Steps If your Website URL is down

If you have set up a web check alert for your website, you may receive an alert in the following scenarios, which will trigger the web check alert:

• When the website is down

• When the website loads slowly (i.e., it takes more than 60 seconds to load). This is dependent on the Timeout setting.

You may follow the steps to identify the issue.

Step 1: Check the server status

It is important, first to verify that you can access the server. Sometimes, the server itself may have gone down. You can check this using the ping and ssh commands.

ping your_server_ip

If you ca ping your server / and its UP, You will get the output as below

root@neevcloud:~# ping 8.8.8.8
PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=16.9 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=2 ttl=55 time=16.9 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=3 ttl=55 time=16.2 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=4 ttl=55 time=16.0 ms
^C
--- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3005ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 15.994/16.484/16.911/0.415 ms
root@neevcloud:~#

If your server is down, in that case, you will not get any ping. You can check your server console for any error and restart your server via My account

You should also be able to SSH and login to the server to verify if it's up and running fine, You can access your server via SSH with the below command.

ssh [e-mail]

In case you are not able to login to your server, Chances are that your server is down or in a hung state Check your server console for any errors and restart your server via My account

Step 2: Check the Logs

Before tracking down any of the problems, We need to check the Logs first of our web server and related components. If we find any error logs or any suspicious logs on access logs, We will be able to identify the problems Precisely.

The logs will be usually present at directory /var/log. if you have an Apache server running on an Ubuntu server, by default the logs will be kept in /var/log/apache2. Check the files in this directory to see what kind of error messages are being generated. If you’re using a distribution that refers to Apache as httpd by default the logs will be kept at

/var/log/httpd.log

If you are using Nginx as your web server, The logs are usually located at the below location

/var/log/nginx/access.log
/var/log/nginx/error.log
/var/log/nginx/nginx_error.log
/var/log/nginx/access_error.log

Check the files in this directory to see what kind of error messages are being generated. Alternatively, you can also check the web-server configuration files if you have configured a manual path for logs.

To check the latest logs generated from the server, You can run the below tail command as shown in the below example

tail -f /var/log/nginx/access.log
tail -f /var/log/httpd.log

You can also view with less command to view full logs as below, Make sure to change the log file path as per yours in the below command.

less /var/log/nginx/access.log

Once you have identified the issue over the logs, You can easily be able to detect the issue and fix the problem accordingly.

Step 3: Make sure your web server is running

You can verify if your services are up and running fine, One method to check if the services are running is the distribution’s preferred method is to check with the below-shared command.

Use the status command to check if the service is up or not. If the service is not running you can start it with the below start command

If you’re using a distribution that refers to Apache as Apache2, commands to use apache2 functionality are as below

service apache2 start
service apache2 stop
service apache2 restart
service apache2 reload
service apache2 status

If you’re using a distribution that refers to Apache as httpd, then the commands are as follows:

service httpd start
service httpd stop
service httpd restart
service httpd reload
service httpd status

The commands to use Nginx functionality are as below

service nginx start
service nginx stop
service nginx restart
service nginx reload
service nginx status

Step 4: Verifying the Syntax of the Web server

If your web server is failing to start, this means that there can be an issue with your configuration file.

Both Apache and Nginx need a correct directive syntax for the files to be read. The configuration files are located below

Default Configuration Directories for Apache is

Debian and Ubuntu distributions : /etc/apache2/ Fedora, CentOS distributions : /etc/httpd/

Configuration Directories for Nginx is

/etc/nginx/

Each of these web servers also provides you with the ability to check the configuration syntax of your files. To check the syntax of your Apache configuration files without needing to restart the server, you can run the following command on Debian and Ubuntu systems

apache2ctl -t
httpd -t

To check configuration Syntax on Nginx, Use the below command

nginx -t

Once you run the above command you will get a message like Syntax OK or Test is successful, This means that there is no error at your web server configuration. if you get a message like “test failed”, There is an invalid argument that is provided in the configuration file that needs to be edited.

Step 5: Is your Database back-end running Fine

If you have configured your site to connect with a database back-end like MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, etc. you need to make sure that it is up and running. You can do this as you checked for the Web server.

Run the below command to verify if your database is MySQL/Mongod whichever you are running.

service mysql status
service mysqld status
service mongod status

Alternately you can also verify with the below netstat command

netstat -ntlp | grep mysql

You will receive the output below if your MySQL is up and running.

tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:3306 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 3356/mysqld

Step 6: Verify if your Web/App server can connect to the Database backend

Even though your web server and Database server are Up and running fine, Sometimes we may face issues with its connectivity as your Application will not be able to connect to the Database successfully.

For instance, In a WordPress site, the database connection settings can be tested with the configuration located in the wp-config.php file. You need to check that the DB_NAME, DB_USER, and DB_PASSWORD are correct for your site to connect to the database.

You can test whether the file has the correct information by trying to connect to the database manually by changing the appropriate Value in the below command

mysql -hDB_Host -uDB_USER -pDB_PASSWORD

Step 7: Make sure the Ports are open

Even if all the configuration and connectivity are right, Sometimes you not be able to access the site since the configured ports must be accessible. Web servers run on port 80 for normal web traffic and use port 443 for traffic encrypted with SSL.

You can check whether if the configured ports are open with the telnet command

telnet your_server_ip 80
telnet your_server_ip 443

You will get output like below if your ports are open

root@neevcloud:~$ telnet xx.xx.xx.xx 80
Trying xx.xx.xx.xx…
Connected to xx.xx.xx.xx.
Escape character is ‘^]’.

You can also verify if your App/Web server can connect to your database port on the back end.MySQL server by default run on port 3306

telnet your_database_server_ip 3306

If your web ports or Database ports are not accessible, you should look at your firewall configuration. You may need to open up Port 80, port 443, or Port 3306 respectively.

Step 8: Verifying the DNS Setting

You also need to make sure that your domain is correctly pointed to Server IP. if you can access the site with IP and not with your domain name, you may need to take a look at your DNS settings.

You can verify if your site is pointed to the right IP with the below dig command

dig A example.com +short

You will get the output as below

root@neevcloud:~$ dig A example.com +short
xx.xx.xx.xx
root@neevcloud:~$

Apart from that, check your Apache virtual host files or the Nginx server block files to make sure they are configured to respond to requests for your domain.

Conclusion

We hope that the above-mentioned troubleshooting tips will help you track down and fix some of the common issues that administrators face when trying to get their sites up and running. If you are encountering any issues with the above-mentioned steps, feel free to discuss them in the comments.