php - cURL connect() timed out

Question

I've had my cURL implementation running successfully for the last few months without hiccups; however, last week I suddenly started to have a problem with one specific website (www.viewmag.com). I can visit the site (and have it resolve) perfectly in a browser, but cURL returns the following:

* About to connect() to www.viewmag.com port 80 (#0)
*   Trying 205.178.145.65... * Timeout
* connect() timed out!
* Closing connection #0

For sanity, I tried to ping the website with two different boxes, but each ping timed out.

Box 1 (Linux):

ping www.viewmag.com
PING www.viewmag.com (205.178.145.65) 56(84) bytes of data.

Box 2 (Windows):

ping www.viewmag.com

Pinging www.viewmag.com [205.178.145.65] with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

My cURL is as follows:

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.viewmag.com');
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'cURL crawler');
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 2);
$html = curl_exec($ch);

Does anyone have any thoughts as to why cURL is failing and why I would be able to visit this site in a browser, but not be able to ping/cURL it? Thanks in advance

Answer 1

1. Maybe your server IP is banned on that site?

2. Maybe try to set longer timeout? I visited that site and it works so slow, that you may need more than 5 seconds.

---

Added later:

Looks like your server IP is banned.

I tried this (its copy of your code, changes are in comments):

<?php

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.viewmag.com');

// I changed UA here
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1');

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 2);
$html = curl_exec($ch);

// I added this 
echo $html; 

?>

and it works on my test server (data center in Germany).