If you run a small web site like I do, sometimes you may find yourself off-line! This happened to me the other day. Hopefully this is not something that will happen too often, but when it does happen, it’s nice to know there are a few free tools you can use to do some troubleshooting. These tools also can give you the “warm fuzzy” feeling that everything is A-OK with your website and that you can benefit of world-wide traffic.

Since I run a webcomic web site which publishes every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, I am checking my website almost daily. However, the other day after typing in my URL on my browser, I got a message that my URL address could not be determined. Since I have a total of 5 small websites, which are all on the same host computer located at my web provider, I decided to check out my other sites. Yep, sure enough, they were still on line, so that means the web server is up.

My second step was to log into the control panel from my web provider, to see if my files were all there. Yes again, everything was fine. Well since the web host computer is up, and all my files are still there, then maybe there is a problem with my URL?

Third step. Ok, since my domain name was purchased at a different registrar than where I get my web hosting from, perhaps something happened to it? So I logged into my account with the registrar, and I checked that my domain name was still pointing to the Doman Name Service servers belonging to my web host provider. Yes, that was still fine also.

Fourth step, I logged a trouble ticket with my web host provider. But I’m still curious of what might be the problem. So I managed to find a web site that will do some testing for me. The first one I find is called http://network-tools.com . This tool will let you send a “ping” to your website. However, my website could not return a ping since its address could not be determined. There is another tool called “nslookup”, which will retrieve the IP address for a URL, but still nothing comes back. Why is there no longer an IP address, yet my other websites on the same web server are fine?

Fifth step, I find another cool web site called http://www.checkdns.net . This web site tells me what happened to my IP address. Find the “CheckDNS Quick Check Utility” on the main page, enter your domain name, and this web site goes to work. So first it finds the two Domain Name Service (DNS) servers from my web host provider. Seems the main DNS server is down, but the backup DNS server is NOT Authoritative for my domain name! Bingo! So I check my other websites, and it turns out that both of my web hosts provider’s DNS servers are authoritative for all my other websites. Now I know why they are still working when my webcomic website is down! It only takes a couple of hours for my web host provider to bring up their main DNS server, but I still need to talk to them to get this problem fixed. But is sure is nice to know there are simple troubleshooting things you can do to help you figure out if your website is up for traffic.

Another thing you can do to help ensure you don’t loose out on all your website traffic is to build your web pages with clean, correct HTML code, and to test it out on at least a couple of the main browsers. It is possible to have a web site that looks fine on one browser, and look messy on another type of browser. Messy pages lose out on website traffic. I always test on both Firefox and IE. You can use the html code validation at http://validator.w3.org . Just enter in your URL and see what comes up as errors. Interestingly, my first website was built using an html-generator. However, pages from that website fail proper code validation. Sometimes though, it might be hard to have a completely clean page of HTML code that does not have warnings from the html validation. There is another cool web site that will let you know if your website renders properly on 50 plus different types of browsers; http://browsershots.org. Enter in the URL, and in about one half you will see the screen snapshots of what your website looks like on a bunch of different browsers. Keep in mind you can only do one request a day on a given website, otherwise you need to register. Also, if your website is still quite new and your traffic is low, your analytics will show a spike of extra traffic caused by using the “Browsershots” website. You can expect about 40 visits or so from Germany, France, and Switzerland.

These neat tools will let you know that your website is capable of accepting traffic from all over the world.

Cheers!

Michel

Visit my web comic at CorydonCafé.com

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