“Hi. I think our web site is down.”
Nothing can ruin a day faster than those words. It can send an afternoon into the can in three seconds flat.
On the positive side, more often than not it’s really not a web site / web server problem. On the negative side, that really doesn’t matter — you still need to go through all of the requisite steps to properly diagnose and isolate the actual problem.
When faced with a generic “Is the web site is down?” query, the best course of action is to quickly check a few of the basic fundamentals to rule out 90% of the most common and most obvious issues, continuing to peel back the onion (so to speak) through each subsequent layer.
First, I obviously check the web site myself, from my own machine or phone. If I can reach it and make it respond to dynamic requests (that is to say, hit pages and see them load, especially if database-driven), then that proves that the web site is alive and responsive, and I’m not just seeing older pages cached from hours or days before. In that case we’re usually done — the issue is the client’s own Internet connectivity at their location, or with their immediate upstream Internet provider. Maybe their cable modem provider (etc.) is having a glitch, and so forth.
The more savvy clients will have thought of this already and tried from a separate Internet provider, whether calling someone they know (“hey Martha, can you reach my site?”) or checking from their smartphone over a 3G cell provider that provides a completely diverse route to the web site than their desktop computer would be taking.
So if the site is in fact unreachable, then we move on to checking the basic network connectivity problems…
