My site is blocked by the French "Free" ISP
 

I am the webmaster of a site dedicated to the travel to the southwest of France. The site is hosted by Hostpapa (in Canada).
The site URL is: http://southweststory.com
The site is 3 yeas old and worked fine until 1 week ago when it became unaccessible to people who use the French company "Free" as an ISP. (the site is available via all other French or International ISP providers as far as I know).
I have contacted Free tech support but they are completely incompetent - I even got answers like "If we cannot see the site we cannot do anything for you" and they surely could not see it because it is THEIR company that blocks it etc.
Frankly I am at my wits end and not sure what to do next. Free is a popular company in France due to their cut prices so it is a pity to lose so many potential customers.
My question is: is there anything that Free could have changed (not sure what) that would prompt me to change any settings in the for example .htaccess file or anything like this? Any ideas would be very much appreciated. Thank you

Your site is blocked by them. There is absolutely NOTHING you can do to change it from your side. Your site is obviously on a blacklist..how it got there, only they can tell you. How is this Linux related, though??? What did you change (and why), in an htaccess file?

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j...rjSCSqvEDqoZdQ

One of the few that works with Linux, even if you need to pay for the service.

Setup Cloudflare CDN.
5m, no spam and the service rocks.

If you use cloudflare, all the originating IPs would be owned by <nameserver>cloudflare.<something>
So it may impact Visitor Stats.

Hi...

The link came back with an error, I think this site is what you meant. ;)

Regards...

Thank you. I does not have anything to do with Linux per se but the crapy Free tech support mentioned that they have made some changes to their system (did not say WHAT exactly) and my site needs to update its "settings" accordingly. I have NO IDEA what settings can these be! (I got to this forum via Google. Apparently somebody else had a similar problem unsolved like this long time ago!)

I don't see http://southweststory.com on the blacklists I use on my network. You would need to contact Free and ask why your blacklisted on their sites. Verify your not on any of the known RBL lists first. Then, ask them to remove you from their blocks. It could be like gmail.com, the users have to white list you themselves. If that is the problem, you can't do anything about it.

Is it worth asking your hosting provider to contact them on your behalf? If it were me I would be calling my hosting provider asking why people couldn't get to my site. OK, it may not be their fault and it may seem unfair but they are the ones taking your money for a service that you are not getting.
It may even be that they've messed up with something that's caused problems with the French ISP.

Could it be your hosted provider is blacklisted. Many of our customers have e-mails on hosted provider sites that are blacklisted due to spamming. I would check to see if your host is being blocked by them. If yes, switch hosting sites to one that is not?

Might as well double check that your dns is resolving the address correctly.

As always double check http and https. Include both www and without. Double check htm and html.

Try search page. Try search page cache http://webcache.googleusercontent.co...&ct=clnk&gl=us

Hi guys,

Thank you for your replies.
The tech support for the French ISP "Free" is really really crapy. They do not know what they are talking about and I even got answers like: "If we cannot see the site we cannot do anything about it!!!!".
I was told by a network engineer that even switching the website host will not help because what is blocked is the NAME in the ISP proxy server. Can this be true?
I am not sure what to do next. I will keep calling "Free" but this is a WASTE OR TIME. I checked for RBL and the site is not listed on any. (The site has no ads whatsoever to think that it was publicity that they are blocking!)

just an idea: tell them the site was available, so they need to explain why it disappeared.

As I mentioned, ask the people you are paying money to to put your site on the internet to put your site on the internet. If they're not giving you the service you are paying for then you are entitled to a refund at least -- obviously that's no help in getting your site seen by these people but it might pressure your hosting provider to do something about the issue. Without "lawyering up" you're very little leverage with the French ISP as you are not their customer so I wouldn't waste time with them.

My ISP is Free and I confirm that when I try to load the URL http://southweststory.com nothing happens: Firefox just keep saying Connecting... on top of the tab.

As I am one of their customers, do you want that I try to sort that with their technical support? Not sure that can help but who knows...

In that case giving me as much information as possible could help (possibly in PM).

Yeah, try making that one stick. Try that and I'm sure you'll get: "While we are happy to host your site we are not responsible if third parties block your site for any reason."