How to check if a website is down
This is an old tip from early last year, but I recommended it on three separate occasions this week so I thought I’d take a moment to bring it to light again for those who may have missed the first time it made its rounds.
It’s not unusual to try to visit a website and find that it’s suddenly unavailable. Websites can go down for any reason at any time (routine maintenance, high server load, etc.), so when you type in a URL and are greeted by an error message about the server not being found or perhaps not existing instead of the content you expect to see, it’s natural to assume that the site is down.
But before you mourn the loss of a resource or prematurely freak out the site owner about his/her broken site, click over to DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com to find out whether the website is, in fact, really down or if it’s just your computer, router, network, or ISP acting up. There are other tools available online that perform a similar function, but DownForEveryone… is always the first place I check after a hard refresh doesn’t work. It isn’t a foolproof solution (e.g., some websites may be housed on multiple servers), but I haven’t experienced any problems with its accuracy so far.
