Is my website down, or is it just me?

Your site won't load. Before you panic-redeploy at midnight, there's one question worth thirty seconds: is it actually down, or is it down just for you? The fix is completely different depending on the answer.

Half the time "the site is down" is really "my browser, my network, or my machine is having a moment." Here's how to tell which, fast, and what each answer means.

The 30-second test

Rule yourself out before you touch the server. Run these in order — the moment one loads the site, you've got your answer:

1. Switch networks. Load it on your phone over mobile data, with wifi off. Works on cellular but not your desk? The problem is your network, not the site.
2. Go incognito. A private window with no extensions rules out a cached page, a bad cookie, or a browser extension blocking it.
3. Check from somewhere that isn't you. Use an external checker that loads the URL from its own servers, ideally from more than one region. If it loads for them, the site is up.
4. Flush your DNS. If a recent DNS change hasn't reached you yet, your machine may be aiming at an old, dead address while everyone else is fine.

If it's just you

Good news and a short list. When a site loads for the outside world but not for you, the usual causes are local:

• Stale DNS — your resolver is still pointing at an old IP after a migration.
• Browser cache or an extension — an ad blocker, privacy tool, or cached error page getting in the way.
• Your network or ISP — a routing hiccup between you and the host, or an office firewall.
• You've been rate-limited or blocked — refreshed too hard while testing and tripped a limit on your own IP.

If it's down for everyone

Now it's real, and it's usually one of a handful of things — most of them unglamorous:

• A bad deploy — the last release broke the build or crashes on boot.
• An expired SSL certificate — the site "works" but every browser throws a security wall. Quick to confirm with an SSL expiry check.
• An expired domain — the renewal card failed months ago and today it lapsed.
• A DNS misconfiguration — a record edited wrong, now resolving nowhere.
• The host itself — an outage or a free tier that hit a limit and got suspended.

The better version: know before you're the one checking

Running this test means you've already noticed the site is down — which means it was down for some stretch before you looked. For anything with real users, that's the part to fix: not how fast you diagnose it, but whether you find out before your users do.

A monitor checks your URL from multiple locations on a schedule and emails you the moment it stops answering — so "is it down or just me" is already answered before you'd have thought to ask. If you're weighing options, we compare the ones that fit small projects in the best uptime monitoring for indie hackers roundup, including the alternatives to UptimeRobot.