Cannot connect to your website? Is your website down?
Q.: Help! I can’t connect to my site, my email seems to be down, and I can’t login through FTP.
A.: If your website appears to be down there can be several reasons for this. The 2 most common problems are server problems or connectivity to the data center or server. First of all – Verify with your domain registrar that your domain has not yet expired. If your domain has not yet expired, please do a trace route from your machine to your account before assuming that a machine is down. This is because sometimes your site cannot be reached due to something that is beyond the web hosts control, such as a connection problem somewhere between your location and the server, or an intermittent problem at your ISP’s end, etc. – Doing a trace route would often help determine where the blockage is and whether we can do anything to help.
A.: If your website appears to be down there can be several reasons for this. The 2 most common problems are server problems or connectivity to the data center or server. First of all – Verify with your domain registrar that your domain has not yet expired. If your domain has not yet expired, please do a trace route from your machine to your account before assuming that a machine is down. This is because sometimes your site cannot be reached due to something that is beyond the web hosts control, such as a connection problem somewhere between your location and the server, or an intermittent problem at your ISP’s end, etc. – Doing a trace route would often help determine where the blockage is and whether we can do anything to help.
To do a trace route from your machine:
1. Bring up a dos prompt and type in “tracert yourdomainname.com/net/org/etc”
2. Hit Enter and let the trace route go its way – the trace route will display a list of “hops” within the path taken from your local machine to your account. These hops represent various physical locations along the path.
3. From the chart you should usually be able to tell where the cause of the “blockage” is.
Assuming the server hosting your website is down – check with your web host to see if there has been an announcement in the support forum, a help desk area or any other form of website that informs customers about the system status. In most cases a web host knows already about a problem on a specific server before you can let them know about it. Most web hosting companies have monitoring tools in place that page them when a problem occurs. If you do not find an announcement about ‘your’ server being down – submit a help desk ticket (phone, email, etc.).
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