How-To: Check If a Website is Really Down or Not

by Omni on Mar.04, 2009, under How-To Guides, Useful Sites

If you are even a slightly seasoned user of the internet, I’m certain that you have been greeted by the “cannot connect to webpage” or “network connection has timed out” message many, many times. Or, worse yet, you’re a webmaster and visit your site only to find that it seems to be “down”. What many people do first is to just ask a friend “Hey, does this site work for you?” and proceed to give them the link. However, this is grossly inefficient (finding an online friend can be difficult at odd hours, etc) and you will eventually become the “guy who can’t see if the website is working or not and always has to ask”. Nobody, and I mean nobody, wants to be that guy. So, instead there are some other tricks you can do to see if the site is actually down or if it’s just you. Keep reading for further info.

For example, if it’s some large website that seems to be down (such as Google, Amazon, etc), the problem is most likely at your end. These large corporations have failsafes for their failsafes to ensure that their site almost never goes offline, but even then sites sometimes die – and, face it, how are you going to buy those totally chic new shoes on sale on Amazon if the whole site doesn’t work? — Er, by shoes I mean HDTVs. Obviously.

If you think a site is down:

Visit the website downforeveryoneorjustme.com. It may seem like a long name to remember, but you type it in once and it should stay in your history. The whole point of that website is to tell you if a site is working or not.
There are no bells and whistles – you type in the address of your website and you click the giant link stating “or just me?” and it will graciously answer your question with either “It’s just you. <website> is up.” or “It’s not just you! <website> looks down from here”. Simple as that. If downforeveryoneorjustme says the site is down, then shut your computer down and go outside to play; that site is coming back when it feels like coming back and you can’t do anything about it. Or, you could find a different site to go on if you’re not the outdoorsy person.
Of course, being the complicated thing the internet is, it’s entirely possible that only a part of the website is down, or something between you and the website is down (making the website seem down to you).
If you can’t access the website but downforeveryoneorjustme says that it’s up (and you’re very persistent in finding out if your computer is flipping out or if whatever site truly is incapacitated), then you can fire up Command Prompt (Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Command Prompt) and type in: tracert <website>
Make sure <website> is just the domain name, without www. and the http://, so, for example, tracert google.com would be valid.
It will start listing different server hops that it takes along with response time, until finally (and usually) it gets to one where it yells “Request timed out”. If that happens, once again, you’re out of luck and should go outside to play. Can’t do anything until it comes back. (Keep in mind that you can hit Control+C at any time when Command Prompt is doing the tracert to cancel it.)
If THAT works fine, then somebody/something out there just hates you. Check your firewall and/or any internet security program you have to make sure it’s not blocking the site you’re trying to get to. Every security program has different default settings, so I won’t go indepth into how to fix each program, but if you need help, feel free to post questions in the comments section.

So now that you know how to check if a site is really down or if your firewall is just acting up… I’m not sure how that can help you, other than to put your mind at ease that all of your favorite sites are being shut down. I know it helps me sleep at night.

Did you like what you read? Be sure to get the latest posts emailed straight to you or subscribe to our RSS feed for the latest posts.