Triple-check if your site is really down.

Been spending all the on the phone explaining to a client and their ISP (Eastern Telecoms) that their site is actually up and not the other way around which is what the ISP is claiming. The client is a bank so there wasn’t anyone in their department with whom I can discuss this in a more technical manner so I had to come up with some solid proof their ISP cannot deny.

So here’s my triple-treat. A three step process to verify if your site is really up or not:

Step 1. DNS Check

This website is one of my most often used tool in checking for a site’s health. A lot of the problems can be easily diagnosed and resolved using DNSReport. To check for your site, just go to www.dnsreport.com and type in your domain (in the format “domain.com” only). A clean bill of health will show all fields in white (sometimes yellow). If there’s a problem, you’d get Error results, red text reports and incomplete page load. See sample here.

Step 2. Ping & Traceroute Results

For international originating IP, I use DNSStuff. For local IP, I use GlobeQuest Utilities (ok, this one becomes useless if the problematic ISP is Globe itself). Ping results will show you a response from your server’s IP. If your site is down or unreachable, it will display a “no reply from …” result. See sample ping results here and traceroute here.

Step 3. Web Proxies

If you can’t convince someone using the 2 tools above, then web proxies like The Cloak will surely do. The Cloak is a free anonymous web surfing proxy and it’s a good tool to check on a site from a remote location (read: IP). If you get a “Page cannot be found” from your PC, try using The Cloak and it might just give you the actual site if it’s really online. See sample URL here.