If you are unable to connect to your website there are a few things you can try (if you have the time) to help us better diagnose where the problem lies.
Simply put, the more quickly this information is collected the more quickly we can fix whatever is causing almost any issue. Help us help you!
One of the most common causes for customers being unable to connect to their website is they have been blocked by their firewall for too many failed logins (through cPanel, SSH, FTP, e-mail, etc.) To diagnose this, see if you can connect to another website on your server. If you only have one, try connecting to google.com. If you can see other websites on your server, your IP has not been blocked. If you are unable to see all sites on your server but are able to see google.com, chances are good you have been blocked.
In this case, you can try using a proxy site to view your website. A proxy site will obscure your IP address, thereby circumventing any IP blocks. A popular proxy site is http://www.proxysite.org. If you are able to view your website from there, you may have been blocked by an IP address, or there may be network issues between your physical location and ours. To get your public-facing IP address, go to http://www.whatismyip.com and have it ready in your ticket for us to check.
Another common cause of false-positive website downtime is network congestion or outages. A very powerful diagnostic tool for this occurrence is traceroute. Traceroute shows you a visual representation of how your traffic is routed from your local computer to the server. If you need help running a traceroute you can find a helpful knowledge base article at http://www.xeonbd.com/blog/archives/423.
If you see asterisks in your traceroute, those are lost packets, which means there is network congestion or outages at the hop where you see the asterisk. Including traceroute results in your ticket will help us to diagnose where the troubles lie.
If neither an IP block nor network congestion applies, we’ll need to know what error you are seeing in order to determine the trouble. It could be DNS-related, or Apache might be having trouble serving your pages. Before you send in a ticket, noting what error you are seeing in the web browser for the specific URL you are trying to reach will help us more quickly solve the problem.
