I am not able access certain website

Question

I am trying to access www.psychologytoday.com and it fails every time. I tried proxysites and still but every time connection got refused. I've checked Google cached page of the same. Only a few others reported the problem.

I tried using curl:

curl -v www.psychologytoday.com
* About to connect() to www.psychologytoday.com port 80 (#0)
*   Trying 67.59.71.49...
* Connection refused
*   Trying 2607:400:0:1f3::1:49...
* Failed to connect to 2607:400:0:1f3::1:49: No route to host
* Undefined error: 0
* couldn't connect to host
* Closing connection #0
curl: (7) Failed to connect to 2607:400:0:1f3::1:49: No route to host

Pinging the site works perfectly:

ping www.psychologytoday.com
PING www.psychologytoday.com (67.59.71.49): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 67.59.71.49: icmp_seq=0 ttl=50 time=337.604 ms
64 bytes from 67.59.71.49: icmp_seq=1 ttl=50 time=360.487 ms

Is it because my modem does not support IPv6 or any other reason? Quite a few people actually complained that site is down.

Answer 1

When I checked psychologytoday.com on isitdownrightnow.com. Their graph seems to show that the website has a history of having very slow response time. This is even more evident in your post of having a ping response time of ~350ms. Your location may be a factor as well as the website server simply being a very slow response time. Your connection attempts are likely timing out and are being dropped.

A typical website host uses TCP to connect with your computer and send back the data from the website. TCP has a very limited connection window which helps negate a lot of negative situations like DDOS and zombie connections. (Curl uses TCP as well)

Unfortunately, your options in this situation are fairly limited and beyond asking them to upgrade their server or getting a higher priority connection with lower response time, you can't do too much about it.

Answer 2

If it happens again, and if it's not a website outage, try to clear the cache and cookies of the browser, and check the SSL certificates on your computer too. SSL certificates have an expiry date, if the date on your computer is not correct, it may prevent you from connecting to some sites.