I maintain 2 websites hosted with unlimited-space.

One day, these 2 sites suddenly stopped appearing (the usual IE7 web page about a page inaccessible error, but with a suggestion to contact TPG (my ISP).

Since it was Easter Saturday, I didn’t expect much… but I tried to contact unlimited-space, and tpg (via email)

Surprisingly, unlimited-space replied within 1 hour, with a few suggestions.

After 12 exchanges, they believed they gathered enough info to conclude that the problem was not on their end… it must be my ISP.

The odd thing was that I was able to access the 2 websites over ports 25 (smtp), 110 (pop3), 21 (ftp). But over port 80 (http), nothing happened. Ping and tracert worked.

But I managed to use some IE proxy settings to by bypass all this (proxy.tpg.com.au, proxy.cache.telstra.net… ports 80 and 3128)

TPG got back to me on monday, asking that I check that the hosting company isn’t blocking bri-nxg-pr5.tpgi.com.au

After that, unlimited space did admit that they were blocking the IP address of bri-nxg-pr5.tpgi.com.au

although unlimited-space seem a very good value hosting company, I’ve had the occasional problem with them… another problem:

About 1 year ago, I asked if I would be able to have a hosting plan, but instead if the 1 addon domain, I would have liked to have 2 or 3 (and I wouldn’t need to store large amount of data, and the traffic would be modest). I was told: no problem.

But now, after having signed up, I’m told: “sorry, if you want more addon domains, you will need to buy more hosting packages”

Well at $109 per annum, I wasn’t about to spend $327 to get 2 extra addon domains.

Oh well, looks like my search for a good Australian hosting company continues. I currently have a good hosting company (http://www.home-business-host.com), but the servers are in the US, so the website response times can sometimes be slow.