I wish I knew how to read a tracert

As my friend Ben mentions today, we’ve both been having problems with our BlueHost-hosted web pages (and the irony of Matt Heaton’s post is not lost on me).

What’s really interesting though is that both of our sites have been going down at the same time (this is apparently because we’re on the same machine at Bluehost), and we’ve both been e-mailing tech support, but we’re being told totally different stories.

The problem is that I don’t know enough about how the internet actually connects to really take a look at the problem myself. The tech support people I’ve been talking to keep telling me that the problem is on my end of the connection (read=not their fault), but the people Ben has been talking to apparently think it has to do with some glitches in their box on that end.

Ben actually got them to reboot their machine, so hopefully that’ll do some good, and my site will stop having so much downtime.

Normally I wouldn’t complain about downtime, but the fact of the matter is that I’m trying to run Flicker as a publishing business, and downtime (that I’m paying for) is lost revenue. Combine that with the fact that I’ve had more downtime with BlueHost in the past month and a half than I’ve had with CrystalTech in about six years…

I don’t know what to do. I’m pre-paid for a year, so I’d prefer to fix the problem rather than just wait it out. In any case, and with any luck, the reboot has fixed out problem.