No matter what precautions we take, sites can become slow or unreachable for a multitude of reasons other than the server being down. Getting from Point A to Point B is not as simple as it may appear. All sorts of things can go wrong along the way. This page contains information about what you can do to get an idea of where a problem might be before calling anyone for help.

• Your connection to the Internet. It is quite possible you have a problem with your ISP and your access is slow. Try visiting other sites and see how the response time is.
• The whole Internet or parts of it are slow. During peak hours, many backbone providers and local servers get bogged down with email requests, etc...
• Maybe you are the Yahoo! Pick of the Day. Yeah, and that is Ed McMahon ringing your doorbell!
• Problems with the server. It is possible that there is in fact a problem with the server. It can be anything from a communication routing problem to an overloaded server.

Quite often, by the time you figure out the problem, it will have somehow fixed itself. Somehow your site knows a trip to the doctor might happen and all of a sudden, everything stops hurting.

Is there anything I can do to verify what's wrong?

If you are using Windows 95/NT, try pinging the server:

1. click the 'Start' button
2. click 'Programs'
3. click 'MS DOS Prompt' to start up a DOS window
4. Type: C:\\> PING mydomain.com [ ping futurequest.net ]

The above example indicates a nice, healthy, responsive site. Notice that the time for the response from the server is under 200ms, or 1/5 of a second. An unhealthy connection might look like this:

If you get no response back from the command, well the problem is very serious! But is it the server?

Another test you can run to pinpoint where the problem is.

If you already closed your Dos Window:

1. click the 'Start' button
2. click 'Programs'
3. click 'MS DOS Prompt' to start up the DOS window
4. At the C:\\> type: TRACERT mydomain.com [ tracert futurequest.net ]

The results may look something like this:

The example above looks pretty healthy, but it still is amazing how many systems every packet (avg. 1,500 characters/bytes per packet) must pass through to get to and from our PC to this server. (We didn't use the FutureQuest server for this example because currently I am on a PC that is only two hops from the server, a luxury most do not have.)

In the example above, we have changed the names and IP addresses to protect the innocent, but it is real. Reading down all 30 hops, we can see that things look pretty good until we hit a snag at #14. The router is not responding. We haven't even reached the server yet but instead got hung up on the backbone provider (line somewhere between here and there) meaning the server itself is probably fine but a line/backbone between them and us is down or cluttered. The problem might be temporary wait an hour or so to see if the problem clears up. If the long times and/or time outs are located between you and the server then contacting the hosting company will most likely do no good. If the delay is someplace in the middle, then only an entity that has no name and answers only to a greater power can help. In other words, it's a bottleneck on the Internet itself and you are stuck.

A much more serious problem would look like this:

This means the server the site is on is down and off-line for some reason. Again, there are many causes of this problem and we suggest waiting up to twenty minutes before contacting tech support because the last thing we want to do is pull the technician away from a problem s/he most likely already knows about.