Site is down
Your site is unreachable. This page gets you to the right fix as fast as possible — match what you see to the table below.
Symptom
- DomainDash marks the site as Down with an error code in the status badge
- The browser shows an error page — "ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED", "This site can't be reached", "ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED", or an HTTP error page (502, 503, 500)
- Visitors report they can't load the site
What it means
"Site is down" is a symptom, not a single issue. It covers several distinct failure modes, each with a different cause and a different fix. The quickest way to get your site back up is to identify which specific failure you're dealing with, then follow the page for that issue.
Possible underlying issues
Match what you see in your browser (or in DomainDash) to the right page:
| What you're seeing | Likely issue | Page |
|---|---|---|
| Browser: "ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED" / instant fail | Server refusing connections | Connection refused |
| Browser: "This site can't be reached" / slow then fail | Server not responding in time | Connection timeout |
| Browser: "ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED" / DNS error | Domain not resolving | DNS resolution failed |
| Browser: 502 / 503 / 504 / 500 page | Server returning an error | HTTP 5xx response |
| Browser: 404 / 401 / 403 page | Request rejected by the application | HTTP 4xx response |
| Loads, but very slowly | Performance bottleneck | Site responding slowly |
How to identify which issue you have
Open DomainDash and look at the uptime status for the affected site. The error code shown in the badge —
connection_refused,connection_timeout,dns_resolution_failed,http_4xx,http_5xx— maps directly to one of the pages above.If you need to dig deeper, run this from a terminal to see what's happening at the connection level:
bashcurl -v https://example.comReplace
example.comwith your domain. A TCP connection failure ("Connection refused" or the request hanging then timing out) means you have a connectivity issue. An HTTP status code in the response means the server is reachable but replying with an error.Check your browser's developer tools. Open the Network tab (F12 in Chrome), reload the page, and look at the status column. A red row with a status code confirms the HTTP error; a row that says "Failed" with no status confirms a connection-level issue.
How to verify
After applying the fix from the specific issue page:
- Open the site in a fresh browser window (incognito mode clears cached state). It should load normally.
- In DomainDash, go to the site's uptime tab and click "Check now". Status should flip from Down to Healthy.
Related
- Uptime troubleshooting — the full list of uptime issues
- Uptime — how DomainDash runs uptime checks
- How incidents work — how DomainDash confirms a failure and sends alerts
