Is It Down for Everyone or Just Me? How to Check a Website Properly | Check Host
A website will not load. Here is how to tell whether it is down for everyone, only in your region, or only on your own connection — in under a minute.
A site will not load and you need to know one thing fast: is the site broken, or is it you? Refreshing the page answers neither question. The only reliable answer comes from asking the site from somewhere else — ideally from many places at once.
Step 1: Check from outside your network
Run a website check on the address. check-host.one sends the same HTTP request from servers in many countries and shows the status code and response time each one got. Three patterns cover almost every case:
- Every location fails — the site is down for everyone. Nothing on your side will fix it.
- Some regions fail — a regional outage, a CDN edge problem or a block in certain countries.
- Every location succeeds — the site is up. The problem is between you and it: your DNS, ISP, VPN, firewall or browser.
Step 2: Read the status code, not just "up" or "down"
An HTTP check tells you far more than a yes/no:
- 2xx / 3xx — the server answered normally (3xx is a redirect).
- 403 — the server is up but refuses the request, often a firewall or bot protection.
- 500–504 — the web server is reachable but the application behind it is failing. 502 and 504 usually mean a proxy or load balancer cannot reach the backend.
- Timeout or connection refused — nothing is answering on that port at all.
Step 3: Go one layer down
If HTTP fails everywhere, find out how deep the failure goes:
- A DNS lookup shows whether the name still resolves. An expired domain or broken DNS record looks exactly like a dead server in a browser.
- A ping test shows whether the machine itself answers. Many servers block ICMP, so a failed ping alone proves nothing — but a working ping with failing HTTP points at the web service, not the host.
- A port check on 443 or 80 shows whether the web server is accepting connections at all.
Step 4: If it is only you
When the site is up everywhere else, work through your side: flush your DNS cache, try a different DNS resolver (1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8), turn off your VPN or proxy, try another browser or your phone on mobile data. If it works on mobile data but not on your home connection, your ISP or router is the likely cause — a traceroute from your machine compared with one from check-host.one will show where the paths diverge.
Check from your phone or chat
The same checks are available in Telegram: send a link to the check-host.one bot and it replies with results from several countries. Handy when the site you cannot reach is the one you would normally use to check.