Hosted website intermittently fails to load

Our blog is hosted on Ghost (ghost.io). Periodically the blog becomes unavailable - like right now. Ghost’s tech support folks can’t see anything wrong, and suggests:

As you use a subdirectory setup, all of your traffic goes through your proxy before it reaches us. Therefore this drop in traffic could be caused by the proxy encountering issues, or by issues with the network between you and your proxy, between your proxy and us, or with the configuration of the proxy causing compatibility issues, which can appear intermittently.

Can someone suggest steps we can use to debug the issue?

hi there, welcome. Which domain, and also netliify instance is this regarding?

are you seeing any error messages or similar?

The domain is stitchdata.com. The redirects point to www.stitchdata.com/blog. We get no error messages - the site simply tries to load then times out and fails.

can you post your redirects file and tell me the name of the netlify instance please? (example: laughing-delusion-3456787.netlify.com)

The name of the instance is stitchdata.netlify.com. The attached image shows the relevant section of the redirects file - I don’t want to post the whole thing.

hei @stitch - thank you for your patience. We are investigating the issue, as we’re seeing some odd behaviour, for sure.

We’ll be in touch here as soon as we have an update for you.

We look forward to whatever insight you can provide. Our blog is our primary tool for content-driven signups for Stitch, and if it’s going to be unstable going forward, we’re going to need to explore alternative hosting platforms.

understood - at the moment it is not obvious as to where the issue is occurring, on our end or on ghost’s, or both, (I understand that they told you they couldn’t see any issues, but we are still investigating and don’t want to make a definitive statement on that just yet).

I’m actually going to escalate this issue to the helpdesk, and we’ll take care of you there. You should be receiving an email with next steps as we work on this.

just got a hotfix applied and Ghost staff confirmed that things look better from their side.

Great! Can you explain what the issue was?

Looks like some fairly unique circumstances that are a bit too deep to get in to here lead to the proxy rules not getting generated correctly, between both services, which meant that the requests kept timing out. Both ghost and our SRE team discussed this at length and made some changes today, and we feeling sure that you should have seen immediate improvement. After manually pulling some levers today, we’ve earmarked this issue and will scope out the work to permanently fix this moving forward.

If things degrade again, please hit up that helpdesk ticket ASAP and we’ll crack things open again.

Thanks for bringing this up to us - we really appreciate it, and sorry for the inconvenience when things were unstable. :pray:

Our blog is down again. Can you explain what in our configuration continues to cause these hours-long outages? Is there a better way for me to let you know as soon as I realize we have a problem?

The team is working to help me understand it, but it is something related to the number of redirects and infrequency of your deploys and your traffic patterns. It is a behavior that seems basically unique to your site :confused: I’ve opened a helpdesk ticket to track this faster than this community post since you are paying for better support!