Nothing can damage your reputation as an online business more than frequent outages of your website. Identify 21 tools that will assist you to determine whether the site is experiencing downtime or you are the only one.
When everyone is experiencing the issue of the site being down, then visit the site on a private or incognito window. This will evade your cache, cookies and extensions in your browser that may be meddling with the site.
Check the Website on Another Device
In case you are able to access the site via a different device and it functions, it is likely that either your internet connection or browser is the issue. It could also be a failure on a DNS server or an off-line maintenance server.
You can rule out these problems by using online tools that verify whether a web site is down. The majority of them need entering the URL and displays you the status updates (up or down). Others have a ping test to check whether the site is responding on another external server.
Those tools will, however, only notify you of the status of the site at the point at which he or she checks and often only detects outages occurring at a single point, therefore it may not be able to detect regional outages. To be more certain, consider uptime monitoring service.
Notifier checks run every 1 to 5 minutes and notifies you either by email, text, phone, Slack or Telegram. Its free version will cover 10 monitors.
Use Online Website Status Checkers
Web site health checkers will come in handy to keep track of the availability of a site. They are automated and run tests in all locations around the world and give detailed reports on performance, which enables you to find out the source of outages, enhance reliability and minimize their occurrence in the future.
The most useful of the free tools like GTMetrix with its free downtime checker has a blacklist checker, check where the site is located, the DNS lookup and the check of the SSL certificate to make sure that the right IP address is used and that the site is online.
Premium services such as Montastic perform uptime monitors every minute and 24/7 and notify you via email, SMS or webhook in case of an incident.
The uptime of websites plays a key role in nurturing a healthy online life since, when the websites are down, there is reduced user traffic and a decline in search engine rankings.
The incidents of downtime that pose a risk to brand reputation, revenues, and customer confidence can be avoided through proactive monitoring and regular action. To get additional details, refer to our on-line site uptime monitoring guide.
Test Your Internet Connection
In troubleshooting the problem of websites, it is important to ensure that your internet connection is up to the task. This can be done by conducting an online speed test in a number of locations.
Ping is used to measure download, upload and latency in these tests. The speed at which you can view web pages, email or stream videos depends on your download speed. How fast you can upload files to a server is dependent on your upload speed. And your latency is the time it take a server to reply to your request.
To achieve the best outcomes, it is better to run your test on a wired network rather than Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi introduces jitter, latency and through put overheads into your test results.
And close down anything on your network that is bandwidth-intensive (such as video streaming, cloud backups or massive downloads) to have an accurate idea of your network speed. Lastly, test test at various times of the day to determine trends.
Clear Browser Cache and Cookies
There are lots of problems that make websites inaccessible to you such as firewall blocking, DNS issues or your device has cached files. It is necessary to exclude these chances until the next step.
This can be done by simply opening a private or incognito window on your browser (Ctrl + Shift + N on Chrome, Cmd + Shift + N on Mac). This will bypass your browser’s cache and cookies, which may be causing a problem.
The other alternative would be to utilize an online site status checker that will provide real-time updates, reports of downtime, and troubleshooting guidelines. These are superior to ping tests, which simply check the uptime of a site at your point of location and are not aware of outages in any part of the world.
Most of these tools also have historic information, which can assist you in knowing whether the site is really down or there is a problem with your connection.
Use a Different Browser
You can test a few things to determine whether a web site is down or not working on your computer. The first step is to place the URL of the site in a website status checker (use our free one or ping test).
When it states that the site is running and healthy then you can be assured that the issue is on your side, possibly a VPN, proxy or a Wi-Fi connection. You may also want to attempt going incognito or use another browser to see whether they can help.
If the website is still down, you can try using online uptime monitoring. Notifier checks your site anywhere between 1 to 5 minutes and notifies you via email, SMS, Slack, Telegram, or Webhook. The free version includes 10 monitors and is simple to install.
Check the Website’s Social Media Updates
When you are attempting to visit a site with a social media account, look at the status updates of theirs to check whether they are posting or replying to comments. This can assist in ascertaining whether it is you or it is the site that is really offline.
As a webmaster, an uptime monitoring service such as Notifier could help you make sure your site is up and running so that your users can always get to it.
It monitors sites, every 1-5 minutes, and notifies you when it notices problems – through email, SMS, telephone call, Slack, Telegram, PagerDuty, Splunk On-Call, ServiceNow, or your own webhook. Notifier also has an encrypted will and key word checks to identify more than just failure.
And you can also set maintenance windows to put your monitors on hiatus during scheduled maintenance. Get to know more about Notifier here.
Turn off Proxy Connections or VPN
A VPN will defend your privacy because it encrypts the information that you use over the internet and it also alters your IP address. But an improperly set up VPN will give your ISP or an attacker an open door into what you are browsing, and a typical attack is known as a DNS leak.
A DNS leak is where your VPN exposes your actual IP address and DNS queries to sites you are accessing. It is one of the security concerns that not many users of VPN take note of occurring.
In order to check whether there is a DNS leak or not, an uptime tool that tests the sites at various locations across the globe should be used. The free version of such type of tool will notify you in case the site is unavailable to everyone or only to yourself.
To find out whether the site is offline, you may also use the URL of the site in a website status checker which uses HTTP (as in our free ping test). The test will include a response code and uptime information about the site, including troubleshooting steps to aid you in troubleshooting.
Identify Server Errors and Outages
So many things can cause the downtime of websites. There might be hardware failures, but for the most part, software errors occur. Excessive server loads may be an issue, along with DDoS attacks and other unethical actions.
These issues are minimized by updating the software. Performance optimizations and a CDN can be used to distribute traffic, enhance reliability.
A good disaster recovery plan and understanding how to react to outages are vital to any online company. A status page made public will provide an easy to understand and reliable status report on the availability of a site, and it is essential to be easily understood and communicated to visitors during the process of the solution.
Although online website status monitoring tools may help in providing an immediate is-it-just-me check, they are not regarded as very functional.
They only check when you request it, do not alert you unless you explicitly rerun the test, and tend to be only checked at a single point (and this can fail to notice regional outages). A dedicated uptime monitor provides you with more accurate and timely information in the case of an issue with continuous monitoring.
