Orcas Web is committed to keeping your hosted property online and active, but there are some circumstances beyond our control that can make a website temporarily inaccessible. The following troubleshooting options can help you determine the source of any access trouble you may be observing, allowing you to contact the right organization for support.

Am I online?

It may seem obvious, but if your website is the first site you visit and it appears to be unresponsive, it doesn’t hurt to make sure your device is online and able to view other webpages. This is rarely an issue, but double-checking this step can avoid a very long and painful headache of troubleshooting, and give you more information to present to any tech support services that you contact later on.

Are other people seeing what I am seeing?

Old cached data, slow device performance, and other intricacies can make a website appear to be slow, or down, when in fact it’s a localized issue. You can use https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ to check if your website is down by having an independent server attempt to view your website. If it’s only down for you then there’s a different problem to hunt down, but your website is fine.

If it’s down for just you, contact your ISP.

Internet Service Providers often get blamed for a lot of issues that aren’t related to them, but they usually have information that can help in the troubleshooting process. Your ISP can check if the server ports your website uses are being blocked on their network. They can also verify if there is a local outage or line maintenance that would interrupt or otherwise restrict access to your website.

If it’s down for everyone, contact your web host.

If the rest of the Internet seems fine, then it’s time to give your hosting service a call and see what the trouble might be. Your hosting service can check the status of your account and web server, as well as inspect the server logs for potential issues that may have occurred recently or are repeating at frequent intervals. Sometimes complex issues that require the involvement of your ISP and hosting service do arise. When this happens, you are likely to be the sole intermediary between the two parties, unless their technical departments can reach each other effectively. Always make sure to take down detailed information from your technical support so that you can provide it to other relevant parties, and if possible have their technical department email you the specifications that may be needed to resolve the issue.