How can I check if a Website is up?
"I can't access our company website. My browser is giving me an error message that says the site is unavailable. I'm worried our customers might not be able to get to our site either. How can I check if a website is up or not?"
That error message in the browser doesn't necessarily mean that your company website is down. Of course, it also doesn't mean that it might not be down. Web browsers are notoriously bad at reporting accurate information about the state of any given website, in part because they don't have much information to go on. There are tools designed to help you out.
The service I use to check the status of a website is called Pingdom. It works either as a one-off check to see if your site is up or you can sign up for a free account and have it monitor the status of your site. As long as the site is up Pingdom doesn't take any action, but as soon as your site is down, even for a minute or more, you can set Pingdom to send an SMS message to your phone or it can send an email to one or more people. There are a bunch of other services who also do the same thing, but so far Pingdom hasn't let me down.
You can test your site using the box below, but you should probably go get an account: