This page http://falsefeatures.com/aBookForPrivateReading/PlayHeavyWater contains an iFrame SoundCloud player set to autoplay.
I made it after, in a similar page, the autoplay option stopped working. It didn't work on this page either, not for two days, in several browsers and more than one connection.
Today it autoplays, as does the original, more complex page - no code changes have been made.
QUESTION: Does anyone know if this alarming lapse COULD have been the fault of my webhosting service (godaddy)? I'm job hunting and part of my portfolio depends on this functionality.
Has anyone else heard of or noticed anything similar in the last few days? on what hosting? Cause if it was a SoundCloud issue, or a webhosting issue, I've got some thinking to do!
-Marqso
My answer to your primary question is "no". If a browser was able to connect to your hosting provider to download and display the HTML document, then the browser's interaction with your hosting provider is done.
The reason we can be certain about this is that you have produced a nice, minimal test case. It's easy to read it and notice that it does not refer to any further content located on your provider.
It does try to fetch content from SoundCloud (a javascript file and the content used to populate the iframe) so that is the most likely point of failure.
SoundCloud must have dropped the ball on their end, and there are many possible ways they could have done that. Maybe they deployed an updated version of their api.js file that broke something, or maybe some similar regression appeared in server code behind their /player service (something that broke how they honor the auto_play=true property).