Website diagnostic tools

Knowing a site is down is the first question. These are the next four - What its DNS says, whether its certificate expired, what an uptime figure really permits, and what the outage is costing. All free, all without an account except where a record contains someone’s personal data.

Check whether a website is down Start here

Request any address from our servers, on a different network, resolver and route from yours, and see exactly which stage of the request failed. Every other tool on this page answers a question that follows from this one.

The 6 questions that follow

Every one of these links back to the checker with the address you were looking at, so you can move between them without retyping anything.

Why these 6 and not forty

There is a well-worn genre of site that publishes a hundred small network utilities, most of which nobody uses and several of which are thin wrappers around the same command. We have deliberately not done that. Each tool here earns its place by being a step somebody actually takes while diagnosing a real outage.

The order people actually work in

The sequence is usually the same. A page will not load, so you check it from somewhere else to find out whether the problem is yours or theirs. If it is theirs, the next question is which part is broken - And that is nearly always either the name or the certificate, which is why those are the two server-side tools here. If the name does not resolve, no amount of server capacity helps. If the certificate expired at midnight, the server is perfectly healthy and every browser is still refusing to load it.

Why two of them run in your browser

The other two are arithmetic rather than network calls, and they answer the questions that come after the outage rather than during it: What the uptime number in your contract actually permits, and what the hour offline cost. Both run entirely in your browser. Nothing you type into them is sent anywhere, because nothing needs to be.

What we do not build

We do not offer a port scanner, and we will not. A hosted port scanner is a free attack tool with a friendly interface: The traffic comes from our address range rather than the user’s, which is the entire appeal to the small number of people who would use it most. The same reasoning rules out anything that enumerates subdomains, brute-forces paths, or sends more than a handful of requests to a target.

The limit every tool here respects

Everything here makes at most a few requests to a host, to the same public endpoints your browser would request anyway. That limit is what lets us run these without an account and without a queue.