Duncan,
There are a number of things that may affect your website being down -- this is one of the reasons your hosting provider probably offers solutions that include tech support (for people not familiar with debugging issues) and other solutions that do not (for people who really can do it all themselves). Regardless, your first step probably should be to your hosting provider to see if they are having any problems...
Assuming they say they're up and your server is your responsibility:
Let's try the easiest first -- if you DO have CPanel access, just restart the web server (httpd) service... Sometimes Apache (the web server software) can get hung up and just has to be restarted...
But assuming that's not available (that is, CPanel isn't available).... So far, you really haven't gathered enough facts to point to any one thing as the issue, so I'm going to give you some steps to follow to see what the problem may be:
[1] Let's test DNS to make sure your site is "in the right place" Open a command prompt and enter the command "
ping your-site-name" [ for example: ping
www.example.com ]
We're not so much interested in whether there is a ping-response (lots of firewall configs block them -- or their replies), but whether the PING command was able to get an IP address for your site name.
If the response comes back WITH an IP address, make sure it's the one it's supposed to be (that goes to your hosting provider)! If not, then you have a DNS data issue...
If the response comed back with an IP address lookup failure, then your website is down because you either let your domain registration expire, or there is a DNS server issue...
NOTE: If you use the ping command in Linux, you'll need to stop it with a CONTROL-C, as it pings until stopped. The Windows ping command issues just 4 pings and stops all by itself.
[2] Let's test the server to see if it is up at all This step may have been completed in part 1 above -- if you received PING replies, then the server is already up.
Also, if CPanel is up, your server is at least alive (although at this point, rebooting through CPanel may be a decent next step -- just to get the site back up!)
But assuming neither of those works, turn
nmap on to your IP address...
NMAP is a tool to examine all open network connections at an IP address -- and it's available free from
HERE If nmap cannot detect any open ports, then your server is down and you'll need to contact your hosting provider. Even if you don't have their tech support, they'll restart your server (power off, power on) for free, and that's what you'll need them to do.
If that doesn't solve the problem (and at least get your CPanel access back), you'll need to call the hosting provider back and setup console access to debug the issue... but that's getting WAY ahead of things... let's try the things I've suggested so far and see where that gets us...
Dan
IT4SOHO
