Strange problem accessing a website

[stevenh1978]

Hi all, this seemed the best place to ask this question, apologies if it's not!

I've recently joined up with an online game called Travian (building villages type game). There are two UK servers I have an account on - s1.travian.co.uk (88.198.49.126) and s2.travian.co.uk (88.198.65.123)

When I'm at work, I can keep both sites open all day (yeah, I know I'm lucky!), without any problems. When I'm at home, I can log on to both sites, but within about 10 or 15 mins, I get a Page Not Found error. The internet connection is still fine, as I can browse any other site. When I Ping the site, it finds the IP address straight away, so I know the DNS lookup is working, but Ping just times out.

I compared the tracert output with the site up, and when it goes down, and the only difference is that the very last hop times out when the site's unavailable (sorry, haven't got the last address to hand).

However, if I reboot my router, I can log back on to both sites without any problems (for another 10 or 15 mins, anyway)

Just for added detail, my home ISP is Sky (paying for 16Mb, only getting 5Mb - but that's a different ongoing matter!), I run wireless from a Belkin ADSL router (I did try a direct connection when the site dropped, and it made no difference), and I'm using OpenDNS.

Any ideas why only these two sites keep dropping out on me, and why rebooting the router would help?

Thanks in advance, Steve

[DimaYasny]

the sites might be dropping certain ip ranges, or dialup ips in general.

[stevenh1978]

But when the site becomes unavailable, I do a tracert to the site by name, and it looks up and finds the IP address successfully. Surely that would mean the IP address is not changing? Also, I'm not sure what you mean by dialup IPs?

[DimaYasny]

the site uses an http server, which logs the incoming connections. at work you probably have some sort of a Tsomething connection, or some other kind of static IP connection. Those might be filtered by the server as safe/stable/etc and the connection timeout would be long.
as for dialup/dsl/cable ip addresses, the server might shorten the connection uptime, since those are often used by spammers, or simply because those addresses change a lot.

what I would do is try to contact the game's support, give them your details, including the tracert, and ask them to help you

[stevenh1978]

Thanks for the suggestion, however I also use a static IP address at home.
I'll contact the website and see if they have any suggestions. I have held off contacting them before, as I'm pretty sure they're going to say it's a problem at my end. Also, the site does has a forum, and I've never seen a post with the same problem as I'm experiencing.

[DimaYasny]

well, contact them stating your IP - that way it is easy to go through the logs and see what the problem is