403 Forbidden errors when atomz.com indexes site

[stevel]

For a few years I've been using the excellent atomz.com free search service for my sites. One of the sites I run was recently converted to an osCommerce 2.2-MS2 store. I replaced the built-in search with the Atomz search as there are non-product pages I wanted indexed, and the Atomz search has more features.

 

It works well, except for one thing. Each time that Atomz indexes my site, which it does weekly, it gets a handful (2-7 out of 100 or so pages) "403 Forbidden" errors. The pages these come up on vary each run. I don't see this with any of my other Atomz-indexed sites, and don't see other search engines running into 403s, though none hit the site all at once the way Atomz does.

 

I have the "no spider sessions" feature turned on. I have tried to diagnose this by: 1) temporarily removing the .htaccess, which just has redirects for old site URLs, and 2) searching the osC sources for "403".

 

I would really like to find a solution to this - any suggestions would be welcomed. Thanks.

 

Steve

[stevel]

Just for the record - it seems to be something at my host's end. I complained about it to them - while they didn't give me a direct answer, the problem has now disappeared.