Can't view websites from PC or connect to websites

[Jill_V]

It has now been 1 week since we could download orders, upload stock, turn products off or fulfill new orders. Our IT support (Green City), the service provider (The Phone Coop) and Sellerdeck all say it's not their problem, and yet they are still not working. It's a very specific fault i.e. we can't view our websites from any of the PCs connected to our network, whilst the rest of the world can see them, and place orders. We are still getting copies of order acknowledgement emails.

The latest suggestion (from the Phone Coop) was that Barracuda had blacklisted our public IP address for spam email. I have successfully unblocked this. mxtoolbox.com is showing no problems with this address or the server host FTP SSLFTPHOST. In any case, the Barracuda blacklist was for email, not for the websites, and why would everyone else be able to view both our websites?

Our web developer (Mash) died this year and I have limited expertise. I would be very grateful to anyone who can suggest what the problem might be or how to investigate further. Our next move is to try hosting one of the websites somwhere else.
Our websites are www.organicplants.co.uk and www.delfland.co.uk

[Mike Hughes]

So, if I understand this correctly, you can see other websites such as BBC, Google, etc from the PCs on your network but your own websites are blocked for some reason?

I don't know what kind of network you have but if it's a simple network running off a router then it sounds as if the websites have been blocked on your router. You haven't had a disgruntled employee leave recently have you?

The first thing I'd check is the router firewall to see if they've somehow been blocked on there.

[Mike Hughes]

The second thing I'd do is try and identify where in the network the block is coming from. The easiest way to do this is to unplug one of the PCs from the network, create a hotspot on your mobile phone and then connect to the internet via that from your PC / Laptop. If you can see your websites via that then the problem is in the network. If you can't then it sounds like they're being blocked on the PC.

Another option is to connect to your network using a mobile device and check if you can see your websites via that. It gives another data point to help identify the problem.

[Mike Hughes]

PS. Be careful about moving hosts as you could lose all the orders that haven't been downloaded from the website. If you go ahead with this, copy all the .ord and .occ files (IIRC) from the old website first (maybe from your home PC) as these can then be uploaded to the new web server and then downloaded into sellerdeck.

[Jill_V]

Both sites are now working.

Restarting the browser on the server and accepting the Google privacy policy/terms and conditions seems to have sorted the issue.

After that both websites connected again and we downloaded the orders.

Does anyone know what was wrong and why this might have fixed it?

[Mike Hughes]

If this is the network server we're talking about then it's hard to tell. It sounds as if just got itself stuck at some point.