Website Problem
 

To the Moderators,

I have been having an intermittent problem getting into the ethnographic discussion forum for two days now. The problem happens with Safari and Firefox. Below are the messages from Safari and Firefox.

Safari:
Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator at [no address given] to inform them of the time this error occurred, and the actions you performed just before this error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Firefox:
Content Encoding Error

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression.

Error code: 503 Service Unavailable

Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

Sincerely,
RobT

Also happens with Google Chrome. The issue is intermittent but can last for hours. No obvious reason why it comes and goes.

This is a problem for Lee who hosts the web site.

At one point I also got an error page saying there was a database error, so these two things may be related.

Hello,
Global problem to access
The forum , with computer or mobile phone.

But the main page of the site, index of weapons ... is ok...

I'm getting a 503 error, which apparently is a typical indicator of a server cache problem.

I got in for the first time in about a week, just a few minutes ago, put up a post, then intermittent ins & not ins.

Network problem ?

Also intermittent problem with Avast Secure Browser.
Stu

My suspicions
 

The regular html pages and forum images are on one server along with the scripts for Vbulletin while the SQL database is on a different server. I believe that we see these various errors when the two servers are having communication problems and perhaps when the SQL server may be overloaded. I believe which error you see depends on the status at the moment; I will see "server misconfiguration", 503s and "Database Error" from a Vbulletin script when this is going on interchangeably. Both servers are used by numerous accounts at the web hosting company and so a lot may be potentially going on. Usually these episodes pass quickly and reloading the page will bring up the right screen, but sometimes it is severe or persists, at which time I'll submit a support ticket just to be sure the hosting company is aware that there is an issue.