Good evening all,

I have a VPS, manaha.co.uk. On it I run a few websites, and a Minecraft server. Over the past two weeks I've been having some issues:
If I try to connect to the server via the Minecraft client, or SSH, it either times out or connects after a long while and doesn't stay up long (SSH is better, but VERY laggy).
I've got a decent ping, between 30ms-80ms usually, and HTTP works just fine, I can happily connect to any one of the websites.

Here's an example of traceroute, it has been better, but this is fairly typical…


This problem isn't always present, some evenings I have no issue at all, others I do. Interestingly, if I connect to a VPN (I've signed up for a month worth of Anonine) my problems seem to clear. Both my iMac and my iPhone suffer the same problem, however if I turn off WiFi on my iPhone it connects via SSH flawlessly.

I've contacted my IPS (Plusnet) and after a bit of battling, they reported that:


Sent 09/10/14, so not quite 10 days ago. Since that email I've rebooted the router twice as it had lost connection, I was working from home and not having internet wasn't an option, the reboot restored my connection. Apart from that, I've got nothing. Since their email my server hasn't been too bad, however this evening it has dipped drastically again, and I'm getting ticked off.

Does anyone have the remotest idea about what is happening here? I would understand if it was traffic shaping, but seeing as they give games a "platinum" service I don't think so? And if a game was the reason, I don't get why SSH is also effected? Also, the trace route is sh*t, and yet HTTP traffic is just fine…

And reasoning would stop me from going bald, and it would be a shame if I did go bald - I'm hoping to pull an Einstein as I go grey...

Either packet loss, mtu mismatch or an oversubscribed DSLAM.

I'm guessing packets to anything requiring secure connections is failing as packets are arriving out of sequence or damaged so it's dropping them

If you try multiple (~100 or so) pings with a size of 85-90% your MTU, what happens?

Currently getting pings of ~56ms. However I shall try again when I notice the server playing up

Hmm, I don't have HTTPS on the server so can't test that, but HTTPS to other sites works fine, I've not got another box I could SSH to anymore, so that'd be a difficult one to test…
My MTU is, according to my router, "1.500", which looks to be, errr, about correct…?

I'm experiencing the issues again this morning, and ping still gives fairly acceptable results:

It sounds like their admin staff are as au fait with computers as they are with the English language! That support email was absolutely appalling, it was painful to read.

Sounds like an over subscribed internet connection that is breaking on 'unknown' secure connections, because they 'aren't important' and can't be cached, so are getting low priority? By unknown, I mean that your site is not a Google or Amazon etc.

That makes a lot of sense, Dave. Just noticed that Steam is similar, again a secure connection that can't be cached - though I'd have thought it would be 'known' and so given some sort of priority...