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Is This Website Down for Everyone or Just Me?
March 26, 2008 09:01 AM | ReferenceDonovan Lambright, Automation Librarian
If you've spent any time on a reference desk or in a computer lab, it's happened to you. A patron comes up and reports that he/she cannot get to www.someobscurewebsite.com and asks that you fix the problem. After determining that you can get to other websites such as www.cnn.com and www.google.com, you try to explain that the problem appears to be with the website rather than the library's Internet connection. The patron walks away, clearly unconvinced that you aren't just trying to get out of having to deal with the problem.
I don't have any new answers on how to convince the patron that your heart is in the right place. But I can point you to a tool that will help you determine quickly if the problem is with your connection or the website: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com. Enter a URL and the website will determine if it is up or not. If the answer is Yes, then you know that there is a problem on your end. If No, you can confidently state that it is the website that is having a problem. Cool, huh?
Some things you need to know. This website is simplicity itself. No buttons, no extraneous text. Just a text box and a link to initiate the test. That very simplicity, however, can be a problem if everything doesn't work exactly as expected. I found a couple of gotchas that may have seemed obvious to the developers but certainly weren't obvious to me:
1) When you enter the URL, do not include the http://. That causes the test to fail without explanation. So enter www.selco.info, not http://www.selco.info.
2) You can leave off the top level domain (com, gov, info, edu, etc.) and the website will tack .com at the end. So, to continue the above example, just entering www.selco, will do a test on www.selco.com.
As long as you understand these little quirks, http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com is a nifty little addition for your troubleshooting toolbox.
