claranet slow or is it me, email and pearl

[wesleythorne]

Hello,
Over the last week to ten days my host claranet SOHO seems to be running very slow. I mean all is well until the checkout or pages with pearl. Then there is a long wait about 1-2 mins sometimes until the requested page appears.
Sometimess the page doesnt appear and i get a 404 error.
I have emailed claranet nut not getting much help from them.
Also my email account with them is nearly impossable to access.
When i check for emails i receive a message saying to many current conections try agaon later.
this seems to me to be a server issue.
Is there any way i can test their server for speed.
I am loosing customers this week.
www.treasureislandsweets.co.uk
any help many thanks
wesley

[cdicken]

It took a bit longer than expected for me, but certainly not 1-2 mins. Actinic needs at least 16MB of memory on the server allocated for Perl processing, so it may be worth checking with Clara.net as to whether this is available.

[wesleythorne]

hello,
thanks for looking,the worst times seem to be around 12-5pm
Regarding the email, more often than not i can not receive my email from claranet. I always seem to get an error saying try again later as the server has to many conections.
Claranet hosts my email accounts but i access the web through freeserve.
I dial up freeserve, conect through entourage and download emails from my claranet account.
I spoke to claranet about this and they said that freeserve was the problem. I dont see how this can be. I know freeserve can be a bit slack but i never have many problems viewing web pages or sending email. So i am sure that it is claranet who are slow.
You hace replied quicker than claranet about these issues. I am still waiting on there reply. When they do reply i expect they will say as usal it is all down to the latest round of virus.
Thanks anyway.
wesley

[stuartmorley]

I have been using Claranet since 1998 and had very few problems. I have found their tech support to be almost (but not quite) as good as actinic and that saying something!

We used to use Claranet for our dial up and never had any problems, but since switching to broadband with BT (our only option at the time) things have been a nightmare. BT are USELESS. We are changing to Claranet now that we can.

Uploading our site (1 hr with broadband) falls over 3-4 times with BT it never fell over on a slower connection with clara.net

We have had email issues with BT, 1 day to send an email to another BT customer! - I culd write a book on the lousy service.

Claranet are correct about what they say about freeserve etc 90% of our actinic problems come from the following domains:

BT, NTLWorld, Freeserve and AOL - I accept that these account for 80% of the traffic possibly, but the errors are page cannot be found (not a 404!), a refresh once or twice solves the problems, however customers think its our site and not their crappy connection!

Kind Regards

Stuart

[fleetwood]

I have the same set up - BT Broadband as my ISP, Claranet as my web host.

Can confirm that the problem seems to be a network traffic problem, as it does appear to be at peak times (12-5pm) that the uploads fail. Early morning and weekend uploads fly through.

I have tried all the suggested things, such as with and without passive FTP, and nothing makes any difference.

What I haven't managed to pin down is whether it is BT broadband, or Claranet who can't handle the traffic - obviously, both claim its the other party!

Right now I'm putting up with it and trying to upload at quieter times, but it is a royal p-i-a, especially as when the upload fails it tends to hang for anythiny up to 15-30 mins before Actinic reports the failure and lets you re-try.

[stuartmorley]

Could agree more. We now have Claranet Broadband setup (just about to change the router/firewall so i'll let you know very soon.

I have tried the Mole end automation program and that's pretty good although some improvement needed with the scheduling.

IMHO actinic should improve the upload and allow automatic retries and allow upload without images etc to speed upload times (no need to send all the images that havent changed)

All I can say in Calar's defence is that it worked fine with ISDN and claranet NEVER had a problem.

I think it the usual oversell on services by the big players. When I compare prices / service with clara and BT they are galaxies apart!

I am having a small script written that allows a message to be displayed to your customers when you are uploading. If a file exists on your server (that you FTP up yourself) then it displays the contents e.g.

you upload file
script shows a message "Shop is being updated at the moment you may experinece problems - click here for a mirrors site" or whatever!
you remove/rename file after upload and message no longer appears.

I am writing a small front end that copies up / renames the file automatically of at certain times.

Of any use?


Kind Regards

Stuart

[Mike Hughes]

If actinic is uploading images that haven't changed then you must be using 'refresh' rather than 'update'.

'Refresh' uploads everything, even things that haven't changed.

'Update' only uploads the things that have changed.

Using update is much faster and will prevent the FTP process from failing so often.

Mike

[george]

I also have Clara as hosts and agree with most comments made so far. It's also (sometimes) taking a while to read email online from Clara as well. I think Clara are possibly becoming victims of their own success.

PS: Wish Clara would get some spamming filters and virus software included in the email set-up.

[fleetwood]

Stuart

You mention using Mole End automation - I understand that this includes a schedule for updating the site, but does it automatically re-try when the upload fails?

The biggest annoyance (apart from the problem happening in the first place) is with the software 'apparantly' freezing up when it can't complete the upload. It usually does get to the point when it does report the error, but this takes a frustratingly long time. Is there anyway of limiting the time Actinic sits and waits if it is having a problem uploading?

I'd certainly second Stuart's idea that you should be able to configure Actinic to retry automatically when it hits a problem. Whilst I don't have a copy of the error message to hand, it sometimes mentions a permissions problem, but having checked my permissions, they seem correct, and this wouldn't then explain why the upload would then complete OK the next time around.

This problem crops up on these boards over and over again, and each time the solutions offered up are :
- enable/diable passive FTP
- check your permissions

Maybe its me, but I rarely see anyone come back and say ' Yup, thats solved the problem'.

[george]

I also have Mole Ends automation, an excellent addition to the software, possible essential. I had problems using the default settings but its much better now after I spoke to Jan. Not perfect I know, but I think the Clara/host and the BT/connection issues cause the odd `non` download/upload. It probably works okay five nights out of six, downloading orders every 30 mins (when ness) and up loading the new levels. You can use it on a trial and only need to buy the `bits` you want.

[fleetwood]

George

Re: Claramail spam and virus filters

They are rather limted at moment (at least BT provide a reasonable filter system via Brightmail), but ave you tried setting mail filters via clarahost admin page? I used these to filter out a lot of the MyDoom/NoVarg bounces, which thakfully seem to be abating over the last few days. I couldn't work out a way to filter out mails with rouge attatchments, but did set up filters for "Mail returned...virus" etc.

On a seperate matter, one thing to watch (and this probably affects other hosts too) is the web log file. I couldn't understand why my Clara webspace was disappearing so quickly, to the extent that I moved up to the next hosting package up to accomodate. When I eventually got around to checking the site directories, it turned out the web log file (access.log.gz) was gobbling up a horrendous about of space something like 60MB). I had no idea there wasn't any maintenance performed on this file, and it is just left to grow and grow unless you delete it every now and then. You can comfortably delete it without disrupting the site stats. The only thing you#ll lose is the ability to examine site accesses on a one-by-one basis - and if you've got time for that you've more time on your hands than me!

[fleetwood]

Have recently signed up to the mole end site and Jan is definately on my 'to do' list <g>. (checking out the software is what I mean....)

[george]

I got stung in the distant past and moved up a package cos of the huge log file as well...wouldnt be `intentional` would it???? Bluggers.

[stuartmorley]

Clara DO have virus filtering and it's very good has stopped all viruses so far. It is £14 per year though, but well worth it IMHO.

IMHO Spam filters are a waste of time, spammers just change the word VIAGRA into V1AGRA or V 1AGRA etc. We have almost lost important emails because of a "clever" junk mail filter.

What would be nice is if the mail server tried to resolve the email address and if it didn't resolve then bounce the message, that would stop 99.99% surely.

Jan's Mole end solution is good and does get around most of the retry error messages, the scheduling could be better to allow an upload every sunday night and only download orders through the day rather than every x mins/hours. I must say that I have found Jan very helpful and I believe another version with imporved scheduling is on its way.

Actinic really should
a) Auto retry and don't wait 15 mins before timing out and
b) give you all the silly messages at the end of the upload or give you the message and continue if you don't answer a "Shall I continue" message within a time frame

[george]

I'm getting maybe 50-60 emails overnight, with maybe only 5-6 genuine ones.Arrrrggghhh!!