Site is down

Your site is unreachable. Match what you see to the table below to find the right fix.

Symptom

• DomainDash marks the site as Down
• The browser shows an error page: "This site can't be reached" with the code ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED, ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT or ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED underneath, or an HTTP error page (502, 503, 500, 404, 403)
• Visitors report they can't load the site

What it means

"Site is down" 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 failure you have, then follow the page for that one.

Possible underlying issues

Match what you see in your browser (or the reason DomainDash shows) to the right page. Chrome shows the heading "This site can't be reached" for a refused connection, a timeout and a DNS failure alike, so go by the code underneath it:

What you're seeing	Likely issue	Page
Browser: "ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED" / instant fail	Server refusing connections	Connection refused
Browser: "ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT" / 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

1. Open DomainDash and look at the uptime status for the affected site. The site shows Down, with a plain-English reason for the failure. That reason maps to one of the pages above.

2. If you need to dig deeper, run this from a terminal to see what's happening at the connection level:

   curl -v https://example.com

   Replace example.com with your domain. A TCP connection failure means you have a connectivity issue: an instant "Connection refused" points to connection refused, while a request that hangs with no response before failing points to a connection timeout. An HTTP status code in the response means the server is reachable but replying with an error.

3. 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

Once you've applied the fix from the specific issue page, confirm it worked:

1. Open the site in a fresh browser window (incognito mode clears cached state). It should load normally.
2. Open the site in DomainDash. After the first passing check the site page header reads Recovering, and once recovery is confirmed it reads Healthy. If uptime for the selected timeframe (24 hours by default) is under 97%, it reads Unstable until the figure recovers.

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