Problem Uploading to Fsnet Website

I have an fsnet.co.uk website. I've been uploading to it regularly for 10 years using CuteFTP.

Recently, however, although the FTP upload works perfectly, the new version of the uploaded pages do not always appear online.

Sometimes you see a really old version of the page (dating from around April 2014) online. Then when you look an hour later the new version is there. Then later the April version is back. It's just random whether you get the latest version or the April version. (But never a version between the April and latest versions!)

I've tried accessing the site from other computers, on other networks and from other locations over the past couple of weeks. Always the same pot luck whether you get the April or the latest version.

How can this be?!

EE's unsupported servers serving this deprecated facility.

See this discussion: Old Versions of Freeserve & Fsnet Websites Appearing Online

Thanks for the link to that other thread.

Just had a look at how many freeserve, fsworld, wanadoo etc websites there are - about a million! No doubt many are abandoned, but there must be loads of people who still use their website and have Orange broadband so they can maintain their website. (You can't upload unless you're connected via Orange.)

If EE don't at least keep these websites operating technically correctly they could get a nasty surprise - a lot of customer de-camping to cheaper broadband suppliers.

Whatever finger trouble has caused EE to sometimes serve up old versions of freeserve websites it's got to be worth them fixing it. My guess is it's one of those things where a techie takes a look at it, goes 'oops', does a quick change to something and hey presto! problem fixed.

Who says they still have a techie who knows Freeserve code?

How do you know how many sites there are? If you know their names the OP in the EE thread is interesting in knowing them. I still think that the majority who created them under Freeserve/Wanadoo/Orange have since left.

Forget that! Just been told that the account suspension process was ceased on 28/02/12.

Edited by XRaySpeX (Fri 26-Sep-14 21:25:03)

Are you aware that the Orange dial-up is being withdrawn end-Oct? That will count out many of your 1 Million Webspace users.

Ah ha. Looks like the problem might be due to a change EE made to their hosting arrangements in March.

http://ns.whatmyip.co/browse/sites_history/1/host/we...

Could that explain why old March versions of websites sometimes appear?

Edited by TechFree (Sun 28-Sep-14 17:01:57)

It transpires there are 4 Domain Name Servers that route freeserve website visitors to the IP address where these websites live. Trouble is, two of these DNSs were pointing to an IP address that contained out of date versions of these websites.

So when website owners uploaded then checked online to see if their upload worked, if they happened to see the out of date version, they thought their upload had not worked.

The two DNSs that pointed to the wrong IP address have, at the time of writing, been disabled. The two remaining DNSs route visitors to the IP address that contains up to date versions of freeserve.co.uk, fsnet.co.uk, orangehome.co.uk, etc websites.

Edited by TechFree (Sun 16-Nov-14 16:27:09)