Difficulty Accessing Video Help

[usually_quiet]

I have been having difficulty accessing this website since April 1st. It doesn't matter which browser I use. IE 7 and Firefox both have problems.

The home page times out more often than not. I can usually load the forums page, but not always. I seem to have better luck in the early evening and this morning (Sunday) than other times in the day. I am used to pages loading very slowly and timing out now and then because I have dialup service, but I have never had problems like this since I found this site in 2005 and I am not having the same difficulties with other websites. Is this site suddenly wildly popular? Are others having this problem?

[redwudz]

Try deleting your browser cookies for this site. That should reset your logon data. That's the most common cause of access problems. I'm not aware of any recent problems with access.

[usually_quiet]

Thanks redwudz. I'll try that and post again here if it doesn't work. It may take a few days to be sure that the problem has been solved.

[Baldrick]

Nope, our servers are not overloaded but it could be some other network problem.

Does www.theplanet.com work fine? They are our host and are on same network.
Can you run a tracert forum.videohelp.com from a command line prompt and post the last ip-addresses?

edit: Or it could be google adsense banners that loads very slow.

[usually_quiet]

Thanks for the help Baldrick.

Redwdz's suggestion may have helped. I seem to be able to access the homepage more readily, but only time wiil tell.

I tried www.theplanet.com, and it loads slowly, but I with all the stuff on that page. I don't expct better at 24kbps.

Here is the last line of the trace:
16 201 ms 237 ms 107 ms 74.54.88.114

all the other 15 lines consisted of "Request timed out"

Based on other sites I visit I don't think it's the ad banners.

Things keep getting worse and worse as far as websurfing. I think ultimately the solution will be to dump my long distance telephone service and dialup internet service and get broadband from my cable provider, plus voip with "MagicJack" or some other inexpensive choice.

[usually_quiet]

For a while I thought the situation had improved, but apparently not. I had stopped using IE7 for videohelp and had configured Firefox to accept cookies for www.videohelp.com and forum.videohelp.com, but only for the session. That turned out to be a temporary fix. This past weekend, I started having more problems.

Now to use this site, I have to configure Firefox to refuse all cookies. Unfortunately I can't log into the "Off Topic" section at all, and have to log in each time to post, but I have decided to live with that until I get DSL installed (with a different ISP) on April 21. If that does not improve things. I'll have to be in touch with their tech support.

[Baldrick]

Are you using any software firewall?

[usually_quiet]

Yes, I am using COMODO Firewall Pro. ...and I received an update for it on Saturday morning.

[edit] As of April 15, 12:30 PM things are working fine with Firefox configured to allow cookies for the session. On Saturday afternoon, Sunday evening, and Monday afternoon, I had serious difficulty when I did that. I'm stumped. Hopefully whatever conditions caused this won't recur.