Help - server can't find servlet and hosting company seems clueless

[Mickey Segal]

All my servlets were working fine on commercial hosting yesterday until a
server problem yesterday that disabled servlet support. The hosting company
kept restarting Resin and predicting everything would work in a few minutes,
with no results. When one uses a browser to go to the
\servlet\check_ip.class form of addressing the servlet one gets the error
message below. This has been going on for over a day and the guys at the
hosting company seem clueless at fixing the problem, even though they know
their server is having Java problems and I haven't changed anything about
servlets on our site since well before the problems started.

Can anyone offer some clues to this company how to get their servers working
properly? Does anyone have recommendations of servlet host companies who
actually know what they are doing?

It seems that a lot of sites on the Web are not working properly today. Is
this just August with the experts on vacation or is there some problem going
around (my host company claims they made no changes in server software this
week).

Here is the Exception I get trying to access a simple servlet (the servlet
is in /WEB-INF/classes and has been there for months with no problems):

500 Servlet Exception
javax.servlet.ServletException: Class `check_ip.class' was not found in
classpath.
Classes normally belong in /WEB-INF/classes.
at
com.caucho.server.http.Application.instantiateServlet(Application.java:3193)
at com.caucho.server.http.Application.createServlet(Application.java:3101)
at com.caucho.server.http.Application.loadServlet(Application.java:3062)
at
com.caucho.server.http.QServletConfig.loadServlet(QServletConfig.java:435)
at
com.caucho.server.http.Application.getFilterChainServlet(Application.java:28
06)
at
com.caucho.server.http.Application.buildFilterChain(Application.java:2762)
at com.caucho.server.http.Invocation.service(Invocation.java:313)
at com.caucho.server.http.CacheInvocation.service(CacheInvocation.java:135)
at
com.caucho.server.http.RunnerRequest.handleRequest(RunnerRequest.java:344)
at
com.caucho.server.http.RunnerRequest.handleConnection(RunnerRequest.java:274
)
at com.caucho.server.TcpConnection.run(TcpConnection.java:139)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:536)

Resin 2.1.9 (built Tue Apr 15 14:28:40 PDT 2003)