Website Down Checker

Key Features

• Instant Website Check: Instantly determine if a website is up or down, providing real-time status updates.
• HTTP Status Code: Receive HTTP response status code returned by the website's server (e.g., 200 OK, 404 Not Found, 503 Service Unavailable).
• Clear Status Summary: Get a concise summary of the website's status:
  • Up: The website is accessible and functioning normally.
  • Down: The website is currently unavailable.
  • Error: The website is accessible but experiencing errors (e.g., 4xx or 5xx status codes).
• Resolved IP Address: Obtain the website's IP address.
• Test Time: Record the precise time when the status check was conducted for historical reference and analysis.

Why do you need a website down checker?

The Internet is breakable. And it is proved by the fact that thirty thousand websites get hacked every single day. That's just the external factors. And there are many more which can render your website useless for the users.

Based on the business size, a downtime can immediately result in huge losses. Count in the audience that switched to your competitor, and you'll realize that website downtime is your worst enemy. Ergo, the 'Is Website Down' will help you to check the status of your website.

Why Use Geekflare Website Down Checker?

Geekflare Website Down Checker is a completely free tool anyone can use to check unlimited websites or services of downtime. It works instantly, doesn’t need registration, and allows sharing of test results via social platforms.

Industries Benefiting from the Tool

• Web Admins
• SEO Specialists
• Content Creators
• Developers and Programmers
• Website Owners
• Digital Marketers
• System Administrators

Free vs. Paid Website Down Test Tools

Free website down tools are good for casual one-time checks. They pose no limits on the number of checks and serve their purpose mostly for regular internet users who try to ensure the availability of a specific service.

Paid website monitoring tools cater to more serious use cases. Businesses use them for automated uptime checks, with results getting delivered directly to the platform of their choice. Tools such as Pingdom analyze website running status from over 100 global locations, in addition to reporting website speed and simulating user actions.

Consequently, paid website down test tools are important for constant monitoring of a high-stakes web project, and free monitoring tools are best for one-off assessments.

Common Causes of Website Downtime

A web service can be down due to a variety of reasons, such as excessive load, DNS issues, or cyberattacks, as listed below.

• Maintenance: The most common cause of a website being down can be a server under maintenance.
• Server overload: A sudden traffic spike may push a web server to show errors or perform excessively slow.
• Cyber attacks: All sorts of websites get attacked by online criminals. However, small to mid-level businesses are prime targets since they invest little on cybersecurity. The most common type of cyber attacks are DDoS (synthetic traffic overwhelming a web server), SQLi (unauthorized database access and modification), malware attacks, etc.
• Configuration Error: Web servers can fall prey to human errors, such as misconfigurations and neglecting software updates. While some degree of automation can certainly help, taking manual maintenance completely out of the equation isn’t possible.
• DNS issues: DNS is the technology that matches the user-known domain names (ex., geekflare.com) with the server IP address (145.25.71.812). Instances such as DNS record misconfiguration, cache poisoning, nameserver maintenance, and propagation delays can cause a website to go down.
• Hardware failure: Though web hosts nowadays use technologies like a CDN, multiple servers, etc., the risk of downtime due to hardware failure still exists. As a matter of fact, UPS failures were the biggest cause of power-related outage incidents, accounting for 43% of significant downtime events.

Troubleshooting Tips

Website downtime troubleshooting can be simple to tedious based on the underlying issues. Still, here are a few things you can do to come out of it.

• It is you: Make sure that the downtime isn’t specific to you. Change devices, browsers, or better–check from a downtime detector to ensure the website is actually down globally. If the issue persists, try to reboot the server if you have root access or contact the system administrator.
• Restore: Recent installations or code changes can sometimes break websites. Therefore, another easy fix is to restore a copy from the backups and see if it works.
• Network connectivity: Check for any immediate network issues reported over the internet. Verify with the web host and CDN provider (if you use one) for any downtime.
• Review Error Logs: Logs highlight every request made to the server and the associated error. They include error code, their source, timestamps, HTTP status code, etc. that are useful for debugging. Error logs often tag events by severity level and have filters to help developers identify issues.
• Test DNS: DNS matches domain names to the server IP address. Any mismatch, either due to manual error or a cyber attack, can lead the users to unintended destinations, fake lookalikes, or simply show downtime. Webmasters can check DNS records with free tools like Domsignal DNS lookup to fetch individual records linked with a domain name or whatsmydns.net to query multiple nameservers simultaneously.

How to check if a website is up locally from computer?

You can use the ping command-line tool in the terminal to check whether the website is working correctly or not. It is available on Mac, Windows, and all distributions of Linux.

In the terminal or command prompt, simply type the following command.

ping <address>

You can enter the URL or IP address. Example

C:\Users\writer>ping geekflare.com
Pinging geekflare.com [104.26.10.88] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 104.26.10.88: bytes=32 time=91ms TTL=57

Reply from 104.26.10.88: bytes=32 time=85ms TTL=57
 
Reply from 104.26.10.88: bytes=32 time=38ms TTL=57

Reply from 104.26.10.88: bytes=32 time=36ms TTL=57
 
Ping statistics for 104.26.10.88:
 
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
 
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
 
Minimum = 36ms, Maximum = 91ms, Average = 62ms 

In less than 5 seconds, ping results will be displayed. If you get a response in return that starts with “Reply from…”, that means the website is up and operational. However, if you encounter any errors like “Destination Host Unreachable” or “Request timed out, ” the site's web server is offline or not working as expected.

How to avoid downtime?

100% uptime is very rare and difficult to offer. Only a handful of web hosts offer 100% uptime Service-Level Agreement (SLA). And even these are reserved for dedicated servers and not for shared hosting that most entry and mid-level people use.

However, the majority of shared hosting providers still come with a 99.99% uptime guarantee, which is decent for beginners. Still, one can do a few things to ensure constant connectivity, as mentioned below.

Choose a Good Web Host: There are many in the market with ultra-affordable rates to start with.

And that's precisely where entry-level people go wrong. Cost!

Keeping aside personal projects, even beginners should not jump to the introductory rates. Instead, invest in a good web host like SiteGround, or ScalaHosting.

Use a CDN: A content delivery network(aka CDN) makes your website available to a worldwide audience with exceptional loading times. CDN store a cached version of your website on their globally located servers. So when a user visits your website, it gets loaded from the nearest geographical location. This technique reduces the network latency, making the website blazing fast and user-friendly.

CDN provider make sure your website doesn't go down often, as it'll have multiple points of presence. And finally, you get world-class DDoS protection, ensuring the bot attacks are kept at bay.

Are there any other Website Monitors that offer real-time downtime alerts?

There are plenty of tools that help check website uptime with real-time downtime alerts. Uptrends, StatusCake and Sematext are some tools that offer this functionality. You can get notified when your website goes down, slow, or has an error.