Last month I kept getting "the connection has timed out" error messages when trying to access a website, so I checked the URL using my usual tool — Down For Everyone Or Just Me — and it let me know it wasn't the only one who couldn't access it. But then I discovered a website status checker that does a much better job of reporting website outages:
It's called Is It Down Right Now?, and it's a big improvement because Down For Everyone only reports the bare minimum:
In contrast, Is It Down Right Now gave me these details and graphs (screenshot below):
- server status check
- websites status history
- troubleshooting Instructions
- similar websites that are down right now: Find a Grave and MyFamily.com
- outage map showing countries affected
- plus comments from others experiencing the same problem
To check the status of any website, just go to Is It Down Right Now and enter the URL / address of the site you want to check, and a fresh site status test will be perfomed in realtime.
While it didn't make the problem better, it gave me a much better picture of the duration of the website's issues. (If you're curious, Ancestry.com's website suffered distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which affected all their online services for many days.)
Hat tip to Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter.
