Just a note to the people having problems accessing their boxes. I'm also having an extreme slowdown right now with pings in excess of 600ms at times.

Would be easy to blame RS but a quick check at http://www.tracert.com shows it to be fine from everywhere but me..

Shortness

Another good site for performance monitoring is http://www.keynote.com/ . We use them at work and they are pretty cool, being able to test from various locations, and you can benchmark your site against others...

i get so many complaint via so many different ISPs ... you can't tell me that all of our ISPs just suck!

Not sure what the problem is, I definately route in different to you than to myself. (see below) The routing to you does not go through Verio as it does with my box at RS. Your routing is actually quite a few less hops than mine about same ping time.

I also did a screen of my file download from your site. (see link)
note: first two hops out changed to protect the innocent.

NeoTrace Version 2.12a - Shareware (2-1-2000)
Destination: treknews.de

-#--------------Node Name---------------IP Address------Location-----------RT*--High---Low---Avg-Tot---D-Who
1 Myipaddress 42.248N,121.825W 0 0 0 0 1 0
2 tooclose, no netogive Unknown 16 18 16 16 4 0
3 s2-0-1-20--0.gw01.ptld.eli.net 207.173.218.113 45.492N,122.692W 24 41 23 26 4 0
4 srp2-0.cr02.ptld.eli.net 208.186.20.132 45.492N,122.692W 30 30 22 25 4 0
5 p9-0.cr01.rcrd.eli.net 207.173.115.42 Unknown 51 53 39 47 4 0
6 srp3-0.cr02.rcrd.eli.net 208.186.20.242 Unknown 38 77 38 41 4 0
7 p9-0.cr01.sntd.eli.net 207.173.114.57 Unknown 46 63 42 43 4 0
8 srp3-0.er02.plal.eli.net 208.186.21.37 37.433N,122.133W 44 52 42 46 4 0
9 p10-1.cr01.dlls.eli.net 207.173.115.62 32.783N, 96.800W 90 126 87 102 4 0
10 srp0-0-0.ar01.dlls.eli.net 208.186.20.67 32.783N, 96.800W 99 179 93 124 4 0
11 a4-0-0--170.gw01.hsto.eli.net 207.173.115.125 Unknown 128 188 128 155 4 0
12 gw-cust-ev1.net.hsto.eli.net 216.190.70.18 Unknown 142 254 114 179 4 0
13 207.218.245.20 Unknown 100 106 98 101 4 0
14 treknews.de 216.40.216.16 Unknown 101 174 101 127 4 0
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*All times in milliseconds (ms), D=Dropped packets
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
November 16, 2001 2:17:33
NeoTrace Copyright ©1997-1999 NeoWorx inc
http://www.neoworx.com

DReffects,
In all likelyhood its not your ISP's at all, it is more likely a common routing point or two that you and your customers go through to get to RackShacks network, it could be anything from a bad switch or Router to a simply overloaded switch or router, that just being a couple of the pieces of hardware involved in the process.
In most cases the route to the server is invariably different than the route from the server so now it gets twice as annoying debugging the issue and finding where the fault lay and trying to get it resolved.
One thing I do fear is that if it is congestion, Christmas lies directly ahead which means loads of new computers, and lots of extra time for surfing which always creates delays and higher latency and packet loss in general.