What to do when your server goes down

First of all: do not panic. What may appear to be an outage, may actually be an issue with your network connection or Internet congestion. Once you have eliminated the usual suspects, there are a few steps you can take to resolve the issue quickly and get your dedicated server back up and running.

1. Test an SSH connection. If you can still SSH into your server, you most likely just have a software issue. If your web server application (such as Apache) has crashed, a simple restart may fix the problem. If you notice it starting to crash routinely every day or every week, you may have a security exploit.

2. If you cannot SSH into your server, try to ping and traceroute the server. If you get network connections all the way up the traceroute but cannot connect to your server, that means the network is fine, but the physical server may have crashed or been shutdown. Follow the normal procedure for rebooting. If your server is remote, you can ask your web host to reboot it. Some hosts also have automatic reboot switches that you can activate remotely. If something is wrong with the network, check with your host. They may already be diligently trying to fix the problem.

3. If rebooting does not fix the problem, and you cannot access your server, your host may offer you a KVM connection so that you can troubleshoot your server’s network settings.

4. If your host cannot even get the server to start in order to use KVM, they will probably have to re-image your box. This will erase everything, and you will be thankful at this point that you have kept backups of all websites on your server.

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5 Indispensable DNS Tools

1. Traceroute – With this quick tool, you can trace the network path from your server to any destination, including your house. If you ever have connection problems with your website or server, this tool may give you clues.

2. IP Whois – Find out what a website’s true IP address is, where it originates, who owns it, and more.

3. Reverse DNS - Test reverse DNS to make sure your server is setup correctly according to Internet protocols.

4. SPAM DB Lookup – Is your website or server on the spam list? This tool will tell you if you need to do some housecleaning or beefing up of security.

5. DNS Lookup – Make sure all of your DNS records (A, CNAME, MX, and more) are setup correctly.

There are websites that have all of these tools available either for free or for small fees. You can also perform many of them from the Linux command line, if that is available to you.

Troubleshooting website connectivity issues

Nothing is worse than waking up and finding out your website is down. The immediate reaction is to grab the phone and drop an anger bomb on your web hosting provider. While it certainly could be a problem with your server, there are a few things to check before going ballistic on the IT guys.

1. Check your own network connectivity. If your website (or the email associated with it) was the first sign of a problem, you might find that other websites are down as well. If this is the case go through normal ISP connectivity troubleshooting.

2. Check your web host’s website for any connection status notices.

3. Try to connect to your server via FTP and/or SSH.

4. Try a traceroute to see if there are connection hiccups along the way.

5. Use a remote service to run a traceroute. It may be a connection problem only for your service provider. You can also check the Internet health.

6. Contact your web host.

You can do all of these checks in less than 5 minutes, so do not worry about wasting time when you could have been tearing into your web host on the phone. With the right tools at your disposal, you can be up and running again in a matter of minutes.

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Monitoring Connectivity with Traceroute

In the hopefully unlikely event that you are unable to access your website, the first thing you should check is your own network connection. You may find that you cannot access any websites. If that is not the case, there is a network problem between your computer and your server.

Normally, your computer must connect through several different connected locations before reaching the destination of a website. With traceroute, you can follow that path to see if there is a problem along the way that might explain connectivity problems. In Windows, run traceroute by opening a command window. Click “Run” and type “cmd”. Then type the command:

tracert domain.com

In Linux and Mac OS X you basically follow the same procedure in a terminal window but type the command as:

traceroute domain.com

There are two things to look for: 1. Sites that take a long time to connect (measured in milliseconds), and 2. Sites that do not connect at all (usually displayed as an *).

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5 Ways to Speed Up Your Website

Question: My website is a little too slow. Do I need to find a new web host?

Answer:

1. Your web host – These is the easy one to assume, that your web hosting company is just offering slow service. But it might not be true. Test it. There are websites that will allow you to do independent traceroutes and other tests to evaluate your host’s network speed. You can also check general things like the CPU speed, RAM, and server load.

2. Check your own connection – You also should not assume that the problem lies elsewhere. Unless you have visited your site from another location, you may very well just have a slow connection on your end, even if you can connect to other sites just fine. Do a traceroute and see if there are any trouble spots between your computer and your server.

3. Optimize images – Image files with huge file sizes will take longer to load. Use an image editing program to make sure all of your images are small enough in size while still maintaining quality.
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Free DNS Tools for Web Hosting

Inevitably, there are times when you need to do troubleshooting of your web and email services, or you simply need to make sure all of your network services are operating correctly. For years, I have relied on one free service to handle most of my DNS needs. It is called DNSstuff.com. They offer mail server analysis, DNS reports, SPAM database lookup, traceroute, Whois lookup, reverse DNS lookup, ping, Internet speed test, and much more.

With their full DNS report, you can enter a domain name and find out the name severs and other DNS information. It will also tell you if there are any problems with a particular domain’s DNS setup. Unfortunately, many of their services are no longer free, but there are many other services out there that still offer free advanced DNS tools.

Among the free ones are freednslookup.net, rrlookup.com, and samdns.com. If you need to know the location of an IP address, these tools will help you. If you need to know who owns a domain, you can find that out too. You can even lookup specific DNS records, such as A, MX, CNAME, and NS. Regardless of which tool you choose, it is very important to check these features before you have problems to help prevent them and whenever you have connection issues with your website.

Photo source: SXC