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Comment by CyrusL | Hacker News Reader

Cool. I just redirected http://slow.com to https://fast.com .

If I owned that I'd point it at comcast.com, but that's just me.

For what it's worth, I've had Comcast nearly 4 years and I'd say 80% of the time, at least, the speed is great and I get more than what I pay for.

Occasionally at really odd times (mostly middle of the night) I'll get a disconnection from service, but that hasn't happened in a long time, and maybe twice in the past 4 months my speed has dropped pretty sharply. But for the latter, when compared to the service I've gotten the entire time, it's just a blip.

The customer service is absolutely awful though, unless by some odd luck I can get forwarded to their corporate offices in the US.

I work from home, which means I'm hyper-sensitive to my internet quality. I also sometimes work through the night to early in the morning.

I've found that my Comcast connection here in San Francisco fairly reliably drops for a few minutes every day at around 2-3 am. Then it comes back and works find again. I've thought about calling them about this before, but I'm not sure that I want to spend a couple hours on the phone convincing them it's a real issue.

I had that happen on my Comcast connection but it was always between 2-3pm. It wouldn't drop completely though it would just suddenly start dropping 95% of the packets and ping times would go up to 2-3 seconds. I pestered them about it for a month and eventually a tech happened to arrive while it was happening, he called their CO and they found they had a network switch that was intermittently malfunctioning. After that it never happened again and for helping them troubleshoot it they gave me 4 years of free HBO and the cell number for one of their engineers so I wouldn't have to sit through tier 1 and 2 support again.

I live near Atlanta and I get the same issue around the same time. It's not reliably every night (thankfully, since I'm on almost every night) but it is at least once or twice a week, sometimes more, for 15-45 minutes. I can see in the modem logs where I'm losing my connection to them and the house phone also gets disconnected.

I'm in the same boat as you where making the phone call feels like a huge hassle. But it's interesting seeing a few other people with this same problem, maybe I should call them after all.

Seems like an E911 issue if your phone is going out almost regularly in the middle of the night. That might get their attention more than anything...

Given the timeframe, it sounds like some sort of maintenance is scheduled around that time- during "off-peak" hours.

That drop is what I was describing in my other comment. Happens generally between 1am-3am.

When I've called about it they say they can't send a tech out at night to test, so nothing has ever officially be done about it.

Sounds like more of a systematic issue though if you're seeing the same thing in SF (I'm in San Jose). But like I said, it's probably been a couple months at least since the last time I had that issue, or noticed it.

I've had the same with Comcast in Boulder, CO for years on both residential and business connections.

Heh. If you don't have plans for it they'd probably be willing to buy it from you.

Fun domain. You could use it to rank the slowest providers. Sort of like the razzies, but for ISPs. :)

I am not sure they would appreciate that as at any moment when there will be traffic on slow.com you may change it to something else.

that's kind of how dns works, yeah.

It's a 301 directly to https://fast.com. No DNS involved.

Only for people that have already visited it and haven't cleared their browser cache.

last time i checked fast.com and slow.com are ... domain names.

They are, but DNS is not used to redirect slow.com to fast.com. They both resolve to different IP addresses. It's only when the browser requests "http://slow.com" from the slow.com server that it is told to redirect to https://fast.com/. This is an HTTP redirect, and has nothing to do with DNS.

i'm not talking about a fucking redirect, THE GUY OWNS SLOW.COM, it's his god damn traffic, he can do what he wants with it.

THAT'S HOW DNS WORKS.

i'm talking about ownership, not the fucking http protocol.

The context was "you may change it", where "it" is the redirect from slow.com to something other than fast.com. But he wouldn't be changing any DNS entry as he's still resolving the hostname to the same IP address; instead he changes the http redirect to some other site. No DNS entries need to be modified as part of "you may change it".

I'm not sure why, on a site called Hacker News, that you're surprised on being called out for a technically imprecise statement. Instead of digging in your heels with bogus justifications that you're rightfully being downvoted into oblivion over, why not thank those who replied and offered a more technically accurate explanation?

i'm not being downvoted to oblivion. if i were, i would have deleted my comment for fear of getting hellbanned. what happened is you just made that up, in your head, and assumed it to be true. just like the words you put into my mouth earlier.

LET ME ASK YOU THIS: even if it were refering to an http redirect, who REALLY has control of where slow.com redirects to? the guy who owns the domain. he can point it to any server or cname he wants, and then, maybe redirect browsers somewhere else, or just serve whatever content he wants. it could change day to fucking day, or hour to hour.

_because that's how dns works_

this entire thread is ridiculous. this is called 'pedantry', is usually misguided, and it very rarely leads anywhere productive. but you knew that, since you seem to be an expert in it.

Downvoted (it's not as dim as before, so I take back the "oblivion" part): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11726714

And now I shall stop feeding the trolls.

it's too bad you can't see how many upvotes my actual response has.

Then you should be saying "that's how domain ownership works", not "that's how DNS works". Domain ownership != DNS.

Also, next time everyone seems to misunderstand what you're saying, try to consider that you might not be saying the right thing.

judging from the number of positive points on my original comment plenty of people understood me. you're in the vocal minority who has trouble interpreting linguistic context.

Nice!

Hey buddy, do you own slow.com? If you do, could you send me an email t e n d i [at] outlook.com

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