Is my website down, or is it just me?
How to tell in under a minute whether a site is down for everyone or only for you, and what each answer points to.
A page will not load. Before you call the hosting company, it is worth spending sixty seconds finding out whether the site is actually down or whether something between you and it is at fault. The two have completely different fixes and the test is quick.
Check from outside your own network
The single most useful test is to have a machine somewhere else request the page. If an external check gets a normal response, the site is up and the problem is local to you. If it gets nothing, or an error, the site is genuinely down and everyone sees it.
If it is up for everyone but you
The fault is somewhere in your own path. In rough order of likelihood: a cached DNS entry pointing at an old address, a browser cache or service worker serving a broken page, a VPN or corporate proxy blocking the host, an overzealous DNS filter, or your own IP being rate-limited or blocked by the site.
Try the same address from a phone on mobile data. That single test bypasses your DNS resolver, your router, your network and your browser cache all at once, and it usually settles the question immediately.
If it is down for everyone
The status code tells you a surprising amount about where to look.
- No response at all: the server is not reachable. The host is off, a firewall is dropping traffic, or DNS no longer resolves.
- DNS does not resolve: the name is wrong, the zone is broken, or the domain registration lapsed. Check the domain's expiry and status before assuming a server fault.
- 500 to 599: the server is running and answering, but the application is failing. This is your code, your database or your dependencies.
- 502 or 504: a proxy in front of the application cannot reach it. The web server is fine; the thing behind it is not.
- 403: reachable but refusing. Permissions, or a security layer blocking the request.
- Certificate warning instead of a page: the site is up, but HTTPS is broken. That is a certificate problem, not an outage.
Checking once tells you now, not first
A manual check answers the question you already have. It does not help with the outage that starts at two in the morning and is discovered by a customer at nine. The value of continuous checking is not that the test is different, it is that somebody runs it every minute and tells you before your visitors do.