Offline Website Diagnosis - What You Should Do to Find Out Where the Problem Is

By Jim A Hawkins

My website is broken, what do I do?

There are not many things worse than getting a call from a customer, who can not access their website. Except maybe calling up your hosting provider, and abusing the poor sod on the other end of the phone because you can't access your site, only to be told its because your computer is not connected to the internet. To avoid this embarrassment, read on.

Troubleshooting a problem with your website is not a linear process, so the following tips do not necessarily need to be followed in order.

• Verify you are on the Internet, try going to a random google search. As Google is very rarely down, if you can reach google, its safe to assume you are on the Internet, if you can't might be time to reboot and reconnect.
• Try going to the website of your web hosting company, ie Anchor. If you can get to them, but not your site, it might be a problem with your hosting company, give them a call.
• Check your domain is still valid, do a whois search on your domain. Is your domain status OK, or is it PendingDelete? If its pending delete it might be time to renew your domain.
• Check if other people are having problems, preferably ones who connect through a different ISP. If you don't know who to ask, try doing a traceroute to your website from a online service, a list is available at traceroute.org. When you do a traceroute to your domain, it will say "Traceroute to www.yourdomain.com.au", the IP address is a number like 203.98.94.10. If the last step at the bottom of the page is the same number, even if it is a different name, other people can reach the server, it might be your ISP.
• If your email is through the same company, try checking your email. If you can receive email, but not see the website, it is possible your ISP has a proxy that is playing up.

Summary

This article is by no means a comprehensive list of things to check, but it certainly covers the main points. If you can test half of these things before you call your hosting company, then you have saved a lot of time, otherwise the hosting company has to do all these tests themselves. In an ideal hosting environment, you should not have to utilize the skills from this article often, but it is nice to feel in control when something does happen.

Visit Anchor web hosting For more useful information like this on Australian web hosting.