Help please is this a cookies problem

[Yangster]

Some of my users have been complaining that they are using the site and then sometimes it just hangs on them (they can access competitors sites no problem) and my hosting has 100% uptime ... here is what happened to one of my Mods -

"I noticed a small glitch this morning thats a tad confusing, around 6.30 am I couldnt refresh the site, new posts button wouldnt work, so I shut IE and restarted, this usually fixes the un allocated memory issue with windoze, but I still couldnt log on, off to host tracker to check the stats and to my suprise we were live and still running at 100% so I used the ip addy and pinged it, and as it says at host tracker we were live, now that doesnt add up, host tracker and pinging the site ip says live, an indirect connection through a browser says dead and the page gets error 404, this cleared after a few attempts."

Is this a cookie issue and if so is there a setting I have wrong or an easy way to fix it?

My site is at http://www.talkangling.co.uk/upload

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Is there anything in the webserver error log?

It is most likely a server/hosting issue (despite what your host claims).

PS 100% uptime is not something any serious host will ever guarantee as this is simply impossible. If someone claims 100% uptime: skip the host and find another.

[Yangster]

Thanks for your reply.

The 100% figure is generated by me... during the period where the errors occurred we have a ping to the site tracking stat and also the server logs saying 100% uptime and also at the time that certain users are experiencing this error there are plenty of other users happily using the site - thats what made me suspect it could possibly be something to do with cookies.

Could you give me some sensibly worded questions to ask my hosting company as they just keep saying it is definately nothing to do with them.

[snakes1100]

Your host is most likely not going the extra mile to find out what exactly is causing the issue. If they are not willing to provide the server logs for the time frame that the issue is occuring, then i'd follow along with Marco and venture to a better host.

The host should be checking more than just the apache/web logs, namely the messages log as well as enabling debug to trouble shoot your site in apache.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

A ping does not say anything about the webserver (only about the servers communication layer), the MySQL server or response times (server can be up, but requests can still time out).