Intermittently can't connect to certain website

Recently 2 of the computers in the office have been having problems with our website (homepage and ftp) and email.

On the first computer, It seems that if we try to connect to either the website or email too many times, then it will eventually stop connecting. I can consistently get the computer to lose connection by opening our website in internet explorer five consecutive times. After that, I can no longer connect to the website nor email. After a few minutes, I will then be able to connect.

I was also able to consistently lose the connection by checking email multiple times using Microsoft Outlook 2003.

On the second computer, multiple FTP transfers will eventually cause the connection to be broken. I then have to wait a few minutes before I can connect.

During the time of disconnection, all other internet activities work just fine. All other webpages open. The network is still completely accessible. I can still ping both the website server IP and email server IP. I just can't connect to anything related to our website (homepage, ftp, email).

NOTE: Our website and email is hosted by a dedicated provider. The email is not hosted on the same server as our website, but on a different server that has the same IP range. I mention this because I found another forum where a guy discovered that the sites he could not connect to all started with the same 3 IP numbers. I think this may be the same situation, although I don't know of any other sites to test this out.

None of the other 12 computers in the office have this problem. I have disconnected the firewall and the problem still persists. Doing a manual disable/enable of the LAN connection does not solve the problem, however, restarting the computer does.

Both computers use Windows XP. Please help.

Keith

 

I don't know precisely what is causing your problem, but I would guess that it may be a DNS problem.

Do the e-mail server and your website each have the same domain name? Is it the same domain name as your organisation?

If so, what are your DNS settings? I wonder if you have your local DNS server as the primary DNS and an external DNS as your secondary or other way round, and one of them doesn't know about your external domain locations.

 

I was also wondering if it was a DNS problem. However, this is a brand new problem and the DNS settings have not changed. The primary DNS is the IP address for the domain server (Server 2003). The secondary DNS is the T1 provider.

Yes, the website and email both have the same domain name, which is the name of the company. However, our local domain server is setup with a different domain name, so that there would be no complications there.

Keith