Introduction

Any client system (e.g. your Web browser or our CheckUpDown robot) goes through the following cycle when it communicates with your Web server:

• Obtain an IP address from the IP name of your site (your site URL without the leading 'http://'). This lookup (conversion of IP name to IP address) is provided by domain name servers (DNSs).
• Open an IP socket connection to that IP address.
• Write an HTTP data stream through that socket.
• Receive an HTTP data stream back from your Web server in response. This data stream contains status codes whose values are determined by the HTTP protocol. Parse this data stream for status codes and other useful information.

This error may occur in any of the last 3 steps above i.e. our CheckUpDown robot has obtained an IP address, but is unable to open a valid socket connection to that IP address or use that socket successfully to exchange HTTP data with your Web server. We report this as a 008 error.

Resolving 008 errors

This is a 'bucket' error used to trap a wide range of problems involving the socket. We try to trap more specific errors and report them under a different error number. If we can not trap a specific socket error, it gets reported as a 008 error. The Status Note for the 008 error must be used to explain what the error means. This can vary with each 008 error.

We are confident that 008 errors do indeed represent 'down' time i.e. if we get a 008 error then it is highly likely that other Internet users would have got some kind of error reported to their browser at that time, or simply given up and surfed off somewhere else.

So 008 errors can not be ignored. We suggest you contact us for further discussion (email preferred) if you see persistent 008 errors. We will then look at the error descriptions in detail to try to analyse what the problem actually is.