How to determine why your blog is down!

Having a fast and reliable hosting solution is important to any professional blogger. Not only do your readers want to access your information quickly, but when various search engine spiders come along, it is important that they also find your blog contents speedily.

One easy way to get penalized by the “Google dance” (a nickname given to the Google search spider that crawls your blog at regular intervals), is to have your website offline or even just slow.

Technology is fickle however, and there are many pieces of hardware and software between your blog and your reader that can fail. Sometimes, you might wake up to find one of your blogs “offline”, and you might be presented with a “page cannot  be found” error message. And so, the question becomes, are you the only person who cannot access the blog (i.e. is their something wrong with YOUR own router or computer), or is there a wider issue. In order to learn more about why your blog is down, I use the following technique.

1. Learn how to use the TRACERT command

On a PC, there is a program called “CMD”. This free program, included with Windows, is a great tool to utilize when your blog appears offline. Simply go to Start >> Run >> and type “CMD”. This will open up the infamous black window. Then type “tracert www.yourblogdomain.com and see what results come up.

Above is a TRACERT example showing my blog when it was offline the other day (shame on my host!). You can see exactly where the problem is. However, I was able to contact my host and get them to fix the issue quickly. I provided them this information to them, and my technical staff were able to see exactly where the network problem was. You can see that it was the one of the hosting computers itself!