Is your website down?
Find out if a site is down for everyone or just you. We check it live from our servers and tell you exactly what we saw - status code, response time, DNS, and the likely cause.
What it checks
A real request, a real verdict, a real reason.
Not just up or down - we classify the failure so you know what to fix first.
Live HTTP status
A real request from our servers, right now - not a cached status page. You see the exact HTTP status code the site returned, or the exact reason it didn't.
Down or just you
If the site answers from our network but not from your browser, the problem is on your side - a stale DNS cache, your ISP, a VPN, or a corporate firewall.
DNS resolution
We resolve the domain before connecting. An expired domain or broken nameserver looks exactly like downtime to visitors - and shows up here as a DNS failure.
Error classification
Down is never just down. We tell you whether it's a DNS failure, a TLS / certificate problem, a refused connection, a timeout, or the server itself erroring with a 5xx.
Response time
How long the site took to answer, in milliseconds. A site that responds in 8 seconds isn't technically down - but your visitors will tell you otherwise.
Redirect-aware
We follow redirects the way a browser does, so a healthy site behind an http-to-https or apex-to-www redirect reads as up - and you see the final URL we landed on.
How it works
From domain to diagnosis in seconds.
No ping, no terminal - just type the domain and read the answer.
Enter the domain
Paste a domain or full URL. No protocol needed - we default to HTTPS, the same way a browser address bar does.
We check it live
We resolve DNS, connect, and request the page from our edge. If a network error occurs we automatically retry once, so one transient blip doesn't read as an outage.
Read the verdict
Up, down, or reachable-but-erroring - with the status code, response time, resolved IPs, and a plain-English explanation of what we saw.
Why downtime matters
Every minute down is paid for somewhere.
In lost sales, lost trust, or lost rankings - usually all three.
Revenue & trust
Visitors who hit an error page rarely retry - they go to a competitor. For a store, downtime is checkout downtime; for a SaaS, it's churn fuel. And users remember outages far longer than uptime.
Detection time
Most small-site outages are discovered by a customer, hours in. The damage scales with how long it lasts - and the fastest fix in the world doesn't help if nobody knew it was broken. Detection is the half of uptime nobody budgets for.
SEO impact
Google tolerates brief blips, but repeated or extended downtime gets pages dropped from the index - and 5xx errors during a crawl waste your crawl budget. Sites that are reliably up get crawled more and rank more stably.
Reference
The six ways a site goes down.
What each failure looks like, what usually causes it, and where to start fixing.
DNS failure
The domain doesn't resolve to an IP address. Causes: expired domain registration, deleted or misconfigured DNS records, or nameservers that are themselves down. Visitors see 'server not found'.
Expired SSL certificate
The server is running, but browsers refuse to connect because the certificate is expired or invalid. To users this is indistinguishable from downtime - a full-page security warning.
Connection refused
DNS resolves, but nothing is listening on the port. Usually the web server process crashed or was stopped, or a firewall rule is blocking traffic. Often follows a bad deploy or server reboot.
Timeout
The server accepts the connection but never finishes responding. Classic signs of an overloaded origin, an exhausted database connection pool, or an upstream dependency hanging.
5xx server errors
The server responds, but with an error: 500 (application crash), 502 / 504 (a proxy can't reach the origin), or 503 (overloaded or in maintenance). The infrastructure is up; the app is not.
4xx client errors
The server is healthy but says the request is wrong: 404 (page gone), 403 (blocked), 401 (auth required). The site is up - but if your homepage 404s, your visitors won't care about the distinction.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions.
Quick answers about downtime, status codes, and what to do next.
The site works for me but others say it's down - how?
DNS changes propagate unevenly, so you and another visitor can be sent to different servers for hours. CDNs can also fail in one region while serving others fine. That's why a check from a neutral third location settles the argument - and why real monitoring checks repeatedly, not once.
This tool says up, but I can't reach the site. Why?
If the site answers from our servers, the path between you and it is the problem: a stale DNS cache (try flushing it), your ISP or VPN, a corporate firewall, or a regional CDN issue. Try another network - switching from Wi-Fi to mobile data is the fastest test.
What's the difference between 502, 503, and 504?
All three mean a proxy or load balancer is up but the application behind it is struggling. 502 means the origin sent back garbage, 504 means it never answered in time, and 503 means the service is deliberately refusing traffic - overloaded or in maintenance mode.
Why does the check retry before saying a site is down?
Single checks produce false positives - a dropped packet or a transient DNS hiccup can fail one request against a perfectly healthy site. We retry network failures once before giving a verdict. Continuous monitors go further, confirming an outage across multiple consecutive checks before alerting.
How do I find out my site is down before visitors do?
You can't refresh this page all day - that's what uptime monitoring is for. SiteTrak checks your site around the clock at up to 10-minute intervals and emails you the moment a check fails, with the same error classification you see here.
Is this tool really free?
Yes - no signup, no email harvesting. We rate-limit per-IP to keep it fast for everyone. The paid product is the monitoring side: continuous checks, alerting, and incident history.
Keep going
Other free tools you'll like.
Run one once, or set up SiteTrak and never run them again.
DNS Lookup
If the check shows a DNS failure, look up the domain's records to see exactly what's missing.
SSL / TLS Checker
Inspect the certificate, expiry, issuer, and TLS version - the most common 'down but not down' cause.
HTTP Header Inspector
Inspect response headers, CDN, cache configuration, and security policy for any URL.
Redirect Checker
Trace every hop in a redirect chain, with status codes and final destination.