[Kwerty]

I have posted over in the Development/Server forum but now wondering if I might get the answer I'm looking for from any Web Hosting specialists on here?

(Original question here...)

I have an advanced contact form that registers a customer for an event - they fill out a simple form and it sends the data to the newly registered customer's email address plus two admin email address AND writes to a MySQL database.

The form and script were created over two weeks ago and worked well up until friday last week (returned the 'error page' on submit - yet wrote to the database [no emails were sent]), after a couple of hours it started returning the 'OK/Success Page' and functioning correctly. This morning the same issue for hours, then a test revealed it working correctly for a few minutes until going offline again!

Facts:

The form and script have not been edited or touched since creation.

Traffic on the site has not been in excess.

Users from all over the country are getting the same error (not just my local machine).

One.com (the host) say everything is running fine their end and has been over these periods.

The form intermittently fails (except the database writing!) and sends no mail, and suddenly works again with no interfering with html/php: in other words, simply waiting!

Question:

Is this a One.com server functioning issue? Is this common?

I can't see how it's my coding error - surely the form/script code is correct or incorrect? Right??

I was told by One, that their servers have not been down - otherwise the whole site would be affected and that partial server faults causing server-side scripts to fail processing IS NOT POSSIBLE (???) I don't know...... is it?

[nublue]

Could it be something to do with what is being submitted through the form? So it is not actually going up/down but it is when a certain character for example is used in the email address or one of the other form fields that it has a problem?

[Kwerty]

nublue, on 14 November 2011 - 01:18 PM, said:

Could it be something to do with what is being submitted through the form? So it is not actually going up/down but it is when a certain character for example is used in the email address or one of the other form fields that it has a problem?

Hi Nublue

It could be I guess. Good point. I'll go have a look!!!

Thanks

[nublue]

I would certainly suggest it is something at your end (sorry about that! ) as the hosting will either be up or down and you would expect one.com to have a pretty good monitoring system.

Having said that, one test you could do would be to setup server monitoring with someone, such as Pingdom.com, and this will alert you to when the server is down. If you can correlate down time with failed form submissions that should be enough evidence to make the host do something about it!

I hope that helps

[Kwerty]

nublue, on 14 November 2011 - 01:43 PM, said:

I would certainly suggest it is something at your end (sorry about that! ) as the hosting will either be up or down and you would expect one.com to have a pretty good monitoring system.

Having said that, one test you could do would be to setup server monitoring with someone, such as Pingdom.com, and this will alert you to when the server is down. If you can correlate down time with failed form submissions that should be enough evidence to make the host do something about it!

I hope that helps

Nublue

Yes, I can see it all a bit clearer now. After doing a lot of tests on input information I can see that it doesn't like something about the email addresses of certain users! As it had worked without error for weeks up until this point I assumed I had the code down nicely! And of course...


... how could there possibly be anything wrong with my code??!!

So it's a PHP thing then.. another kettle of fish for another sub-forum!

Thanks for the heads up

K

This post has been edited by Kwerty: 14 November 2011 - 02:23 PM

[Kwerty]

Thought I'd just conclude this thread...

It was in fact me with the issue!

My php script was set to to send the Email From the user's email address! And presumably this was identified as Spam or similar by the host (I guess). Most addresses were fine, however some apparently were picked out for some reason. After changing the code to "From: info@mydomain.com" every request was processed.

Apologies to One.com if I have taken their name in vain!

[rallport]

Kwerty, on 14 November 2011 - 03:22 PM, said:

Thought I'd just conclude this thread...

It was in fact me with the issue!

My php script was set to to send the Email From the user's email address! And presumably this was identified as Spam or similar by the host (I guess). Most addresses were fine, however some apparently were picked out for some reason. After changing the code to "From: info@mydomain.com" every request was processed.

Apologies to One.com if I have taken their name in vain!

Could have also setup a decent error handler or actually caught errors within your code - well written code does take longer but is benefifcial (as you would have seen). Would have saved you a lot of pain