Great Western Coffee Shop

Hi

This is not connected with tonights outage............occured before then at about 550pm but so far on several occasions.

I'm having to use a HTC windoze mobile device via vodafone (current client has a vodafone mast on roof so my O2 iphone is no more......(weeps copiously)).

Anyway, whenever I try to connect I get a web 503 errors saying the server is not accepting anymore connections.  i can access other websites at this point.

When this has occurred i've proven your site is still up by accessing it from my laptop but from my phone - as they say - nice try, no cigar.......

Any ideas?

Get a Blackberry...absolutely no problem, and rapid querty :P

Rapid qwerty on my HTC -  no issue anywhere else

Plus I already own about ^1000 of software for windoze mobile devices - some of them professional version I do use in work which is why it took me so long to go iphone being a mac lover....... - so I'm not about to go blackberry

An error 503 is a proxy error - you are able to contact the machine from which you get your web resources, but it's unable to contact the machine 'behind' it.   The majority of users browse 'directly' to the server, but a proportion will to to one server which in turn will ask another.   The idea is that if you contact a local machine that's had a copy of the same static page / style sheet / image for someone else, it can then hand out a stored copy; it also works well for cases where you contact a machine that's (supposedly) serving a whole domain but it then passes on some of the queries.   That's often done with Apache httpd and Tomcat to server Java (see here if you want to learn more from me about this  ;) ) (http://www.wellho.net/course/atfull.html) but we do NOT do it for the Coffee Shop.

Conclusion ... one of the machines that your dozey device is contacting has to refer onwards and is probably running out of puff. For most sites, it would just give you an old cached version, but we're so dynamic that it has to ask every time in case there have been more posts and service changes even in the few minutes since a page was last called up.