I picked up my phone that night to check my blog if things were alright and also to do a little moderation on the forum but I couldn’t access both sites. I kept trying for about five more minutes and concluded it must be a problem with Hostgator or something. I went to sleep, hoping things would be fine by the following morning. I woke up to check both sites again to see if the “Hostgator problem” had been rectified but to my surprise, both my blog and forum were timing out on Opera Mini.
I fired up my notebook and fortunately, everything looked okay. I could access both sites without any problems on Mozilla Firefox. I contacted Hostgator and they said everything was ok from their own side and there wasn’t any change made to the server or anything. I got confused as to what to do and since most of my forum users were using Opera Mini mobile browser, I had no choice but to quickly find a fix.
I googled but nothing sensible came up till I tried to analyze the problem myself. Everything worked fine on PC but the problem was that the sites won’t load on mobile. I disabled the mobile plugins I was using on both sites and Opera Mini users could access the full version but then again, it’s important to format the site for mobile users.
I re-installed the mobile plugins and the the problem came up again. I then decided to disable all ads on the mobile version. I’m actually running Google Adsense for mobile and inmobi ads on the mobile sites. I disabled them and the sites started loading! What the heck! I couldn’t believe Google Ads for mobile was preventing my site from loading. I disabled it for some days and everything went back to normal.
I wouldn’t have written this post but just a few days ago, someone sent me a message that he was having exactly the same kind of problem with his site. I advised him to disable ads and everything became normal agian.
Till date, I still can’t figure out why Google adsense for mobile would make my site time out on Opera Mini and it’s somehow strange. I added the ads back after some days and the problem never came back. The bottom line is that if you can’t access your site on mobile browsers, Opera Mini especially, disable all ads to see if it works. The problem may not really be from your web host.