SharkSpace often receives tickets from our clients who claim that their website is not accessible. However, most of the time it turns out that the issue is actually at the client’s side itself. So in this blog we try to help you to run some self diagnostic tests which will equip you to figure out whether the issue is at your side before opening a support ticket.
Note: It is recommended that you subscribe to the “SharkSpace Server and Network Announcements” forum so that you will get notified whenever there is an ongoing server/network related issue. SharkSpace staff will post a report when any issue is detected by our 24/7 monitoring system. If you do not find any new topic after a few minutes, please go through the following steps to check whether the issue is at your side:
1) Check using third party monitoring services:
There are several website monitoring services available that can check whether your website is up or not. Most of them can also check it from multiple locations across the world. Some of the services that allows free website monitoring checks are:
http://www.alertra.com/spotcheck.php
http://www.hyperspin.com/en/quicktest.php
http://www.watchmouse.com/en/checkit.php
http://www.siteuptime.com/users/quickcheck.php
If the third party monitoring services are also reporting your website as down, please open a Support Ticket in our Help Desk. However, if they are reporting your website as “UP”, the issue is likely at your side itself. Let us see how we can further troubleshoot the issue at your side.
2) Traceroute:
The next step to diagnose the issue is to run a Traceroute command from your PC to your domain name. Trace route is a network utility that traces the path taken by your network to reach a host. It shows all nodes the packet travels from sender to destination (also reffered as “hops” in the network), the domains if available, IP addresses and the amount of time in milliseconds that took the reach that specific host. To run a traceroute command, you can do the following steps:
a) Assuming that you are using a Windows PC, click Start > Run
b) Type: cmd (and Press Enter)
c) Type the traceroute command at the prompt: tracert yourdomain.com (and press Enter)
d) Wait for a few seconds for the traceroute command to complete. Once the traceroute is completed, it will show “Trace Route Complete”.
e) To copy the trace route result, right click the Command Prompt window and click on “Mark”. Now drag and select the result to highlight it and press Enter to copy it.
Paste and Save this information in a text file which you can attach when submitting a Support Ticket later.
* If the trace route shows a “Unable to Resolve Host” message, it is likely to be a DNS issue at your side. You may be having a DNS cache or your ISP’s DNS server aren’t updated yet. In such cases, you can try flushing your DNS cache or you can use third party DNS addresses from OpenDNS, etc. to resolve this issue.
* If the trace route result shows “Request Time Out” within your ISP’s network range, it is likely that your ISP is having issues and you may have to contact them regarding this issue along with the traceroute result.
* If the trace route result shows “Request Time Out” towards the end (just before reaching the server), it is likely that your PC’s IP Address is blocked in the server’s firewall. Please open a Support Ticket in our Help Desk to get your IP unblocked from the firewall along with the trace route result and your IP address.
The above troubleshooting tests will help you find and resolve issues at your side quickly without the need for contacting us through the Help Desk. If there is an ongoing issue reported at our side, then it will be posted in the forum. In such cases, please do not open a Help Desk ticket as it would delay our efforts to bring back the server online since we will have to attend to your ticket at the same time. Please refresh the forum topic page or subscribe to the topic to receive an email notification when there is an update.