my webpage cannot be accessed from East Coast US only

  • I have a very strange issue when I cannot access a single page of my website specifically from the East Coast US. When I access it from any other part of the world, it loads. All the other pages of my website work fine.

    Washington DC, New York, Atlanta – no luck
    Miami, Los Angeles, Toronto, Frankfurt, London etc – loading

    I tried contacting my hosting provider, but they say they don’t see any issues on their side. It’s like my website decided it should restrict a specific page to a specific location only. I didn’t install any plugins or tools lately, and I didn’t make any technical changes to the website lately. htaccess is not blocking it either.

    On top of it, I just tried setting up 301 redirect to a newly created clone of this page, but it doesn’t go through. Basically, if I appear from the East Coast and click on the page, instead of redirecting me to a new webpage, it just continues to load using old url. If I appear from another part of the world, redirect goes through. Is this issue on a wordpress side or with hosting?

    I’m seriously confused. Does anyone have any idea?

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
  • Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    First, and most important, question: How exactly are you checking from the east coast?

    Thread Starter Nickany

    (@nickany)

    The page is accessed from that location and then accessed from other locations (this is not an ISP issue or blacklisted IP if that’s what you’re referring to).

    Based on more testing I discovered that it’s the content of this particular page that triggers this issue. 301 redirect from this page to any other doesn’t work, creating a clone page leads to the same issue. Creating a page with the same link and the same page title – doesn’t lead to this, but the second I enter the same content, it stops loading (I cannot even publish it). After this editing the content back to something else doesn’t help. If content is different, it works like it should. BUt this is not a copy/paste issue either as I tried manually retyping the text.

    So it is certainly the content, but why (I don’t have any ads or other spam on my website)? It was working just fine up until yesterday. I don’t mind re-writing it completely, but I’d like to know what exactly causes this and how do I prevent it.

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    To be honest, when inexplicable weirdness like that happens, and it’s definitely the content, I just start by re-writing it.

    It’s almost always a fix, weird things can wind up in the post content (especially if you’re copy/pasting from elsewhere, some sites add extra into the clipboard). If it works, it’s hard to say what it was, but it also avoids hours of troubleshooting that almost always ends with re-writing the post and not knowing what it was anyway. ??

    Thread Starter Nickany

    (@nickany)

    The thing is that I never copy/paste from elsewhere. I just checked my content against plagiarism using online checkers, everything’s fine. This is why it’s even more strange. I thought there should be some sensible explanation or maybe a place I could try checking for a glitch. Maybe there is something blocking something and because of this the issue might reoccur in the future. I dunno..

    Thread Starter Nickany

    (@nickany)

    Wow, I found the culprit. It’s one word in the body of the page that triggers this: torrent. And now since the page is blocked, any copy/paste from that page leads to the same result. When I create a new page with a random title and then have only 1 word “torrent” as content, it gets blocked.

    All my other pages that contain this word are fine. So it’s like the issue is when this is the main topic of the article.

    A very strange part is that I cannot even access any website where the main topic is torrent like https://torrentfreak.com/, https://www.bittorrent.com, https://www.bittorrent.com, but I can search for “torrent” in google and I can for instance read wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrent_file or https://www.reddit.com/r/torrents/

    All of this is happening only when I’m on the East Coast US IP address o_O. I tried different VPN servers and providers, the issue is not related to a particular server. Maybe it’s my Mac…

    Well, at least now I know I should probably find a different forum to figure this out lol.

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    Ha, wow.

    My best guess would be something server-side, like mod_security. Or, something ISP-or-DNS-side, like content filtering.

    Thread Starter Nickany

    (@nickany)

    yeah, looks like content filtering…

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    Excellent, your ISP should be able to help with that, assuming they’re the ones doing it.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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