Dotster frustration

[frankc]

I'm a reseller of Dotster and joined them because of FQ's switchover to them some time back. Lately it seems that their website has gotten slower and slower, and the past few weeks it's nearly unusable, taking a 30 seconds to a minute or so sometimes to load a page. That is unacceptable performance.

Add to that the frustration that I started a trouble ticket with them back on the 13th that's yet to get a reply! That's not the normally quick response I've gotten before, and I'm frustrated.

Just wanted to check and see if anyone here has seen the same thing, or has been having problems with them. Thanks!

[dank]

I don't use Dotster at all, but I just checked their site and it loaded quickly for me. Is it sporadic for you, or all the time?

Dan

[kitchin]

I use the Dotster site often and have not noticed any degradation. I just checked it from several different dialups (I'm in a transition) and both the home page and login page loaded fairly quickly.

I sure don't get 30 second hang times. It has never been the fastest system, but I think if anything it has gotten a little faster recently. They do still seem to lose some outoging mails, though. The Dotster system told me an email was sent, but I didn't get it, even with all filters off, at my Earthlink address. I requested a resend, and it came through. This happended perhaps twice out of fifteen times. That's not too good, but I'll give them some slack to get it fixed. Otherwise, Dotser is excellent at getting transfers to succeed, even close to expiration.

It's even starting to alphabetize the domain lists now. :) I know, the mangament system is a bit rudimentary, but it does many things easily and well, and is better than others out there. I found one bug in the reseller version and they fixed it promptly.

For your problem, are any of these relevant?

1. Most pages are https:// SSL Secure Socket, even the "whois" page. Could that be causing a slow down?

2. Is your reseller page heavily customized? I did nothing to mine but set the prices.

3. Maybe your account is in some moldier corner of the database than mine, or you have many more domains. I have about a dozen each in a reseller and non-reseller account. Maybe you've got 100 and it's that alphabetization...

4. Your ISP is not happy getting on the cw.net network. These are my traceroutes:

Tracing route to www.dotster.com [64.85.73.21]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
...
4 213 ms 207 ms 197 ms 0.so-7-0-0.XL2.DCA5.ALTER.NET [152.63.42.189]
5 199 ms 210 ms 210 ms 0.so-6-1-0.BR1.DCA5.ALTER.NET [152.63.43.173]
6 207 ms 194 ms 199 ms 204.255.174.186
7 936 ms 1350 ms 1339 ms dcr1-so-4-3-0.Washington.cw.net [208.173.52.114]

8 384 ms 1663 ms 357 ms acr2-loopback.Seattle.cw.net [208.172.82.62]
9 333 ms 483 ms 776 ms bhr2-pos-0-0.Tukwilase2.cw.net [208.172.81.222]

10 586 ms 379 ms 510 ms csr11-ve241.Tukwilase2.cw.net [216.34.64.42]
11 * * * Request timed out.


Tracing route to www.dotster.com [64.85.73.21]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
...
7 187 ms 215 ms 743 ms unk-426d0192.adelphiacom.net [66.109.1.146]
8 213 ms 582 ms 200 ms gigabitethernet1-0.ipcolo2.Washington1.Level3.net [63.215.136.209]
9 220 ms 223 ms 221 ms unknown.Level3.net [64.159.18.129]
10 193 ms 196 ms 185 ms so-6-0-0.edge1.Washington1.Level3.net [209.244.11.10]
11 207 ms 184 ms 184 ms bpr1-ge-5-3-0.VirginiaEquinix.cw.net [208.173.52.77]
12 199 ms 201 ms 198 ms dcr1-so-4-3-0.Washington.cw.net [208.173.52.114]

13 266 ms 278 ms 278 ms acr2-loopback.Seattle.cw.net [208.172.82.62]
14 279 ms 279 ms 268 ms bhr2-pos-0-0.Tukwilase2.cw.net [208.172.81.222]

15 274 ms 287 ms 278 ms csr11-ve243.Tukwilase2.cw.net [216.34.64.147]
16 * * * Request timed out.


Tracing route to www.dotster.com [64.85.73.21]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
...
7 317 ms 290 ms 320 ms sl-bb26-rly-9-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.7.250]
8 228 ms 250 ms 296 ms sl-st21-ash-14-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.20.46]
9 770 ms 566 ms 1031 ms bpr2-so-3-0-0.VirginiaEquinix.cw.net [208.173.50.165]
10 353 ms 461 ms 221 ms acr1-loopback.Restonrst.cw.net [206.24.178.61]
11 486 ms 367 ms 267 ms acr1-loopback.Seattle.cw.net [208.172.82.61]
12 300 ms 401 ms 329 ms bhr1-pos-0-0.Tukwilase2.cw.net [208.172.83.130]
13 327 ms 271 ms 281 ms csr11-ve240.Tukwilase2.cw.net [216.34.64.34]
14 * * * Request timed out.

[Jeff]

1. Most pages are https:// SSL Secure Socket, even the "whois" page. Could that be causing a slow down?
I have wondered why they encrypted some things that I can't see the advantage to encrypting, like their whois page. Over my satellite connection that makes their whois page take over a minute to load instead of seconds as it would unencrypted :(

[dank]

Maybe they're using relative linking? Have you tried manually going to a non-SSL version of such pages and see if they work? Just a thought...

Dan

[kitchin]

The whois URL does not load without the https://.

They are probably trying to slow down domain record harvesters, get them to move on to the next little red convertible.

[frankc]

This morning the main page and all my reseller account pages are loading lickity-split (natch). Maybe the problem grows as the day progresses.

Regardless, this slow-loading problem has been occurring with growing frequency over the past few months. Maybe their popularity has over-stretched either server capacity or bandwidth available. :sad:

[SReeb]

Frank, have you ever gotten a response from your post to Dotster? My website is in limbo until they get good and ready to reply to my post from last week. Wow, I'd never recommend this registrar to anyone. Horrible customer service. Steve R

[frankc]

The site started working more normally a few days later. Seems they were just burdened with a lot of problems from the Al-Jazeera domain hijacking incident and DOS attacks from that. Plus they bought an existing registrar.

Do a search in the forums here for the words Dotster and Chris; he's in the upper layers of the admin there and has posted here before; he's very responsive.