How to use the website down checker
- Type the site’s address. A bare domain such as
example.comis enough; the tool addshttps://for you. - Press “Check now”. Our server requests the page, follows up to 10 redirects and stops after 8 seconds.
- Read the verdict at the top, then the status code, timing and final address underneath.
- Use “Copy result” to paste the findings into a support ticket or a message to your host.
How the check works
Your browser sends the address to a small program we run on Cloudflare’s network. That program looks up the domain in DNS, refuses anything that points to a private or local network, and then makes an ordinary GET request with the user agent ToolsPulseHubChecker. Redirects are followed one at a time, so each new address is checked against the same safety rules before it is requested. The response time is measured from the first request until the final server sends its headers. The page body is not downloaded or kept.
Because the request leaves from a data centre and not from your device, the result answers a specific question: does the site work for the rest of the internet? If it does and you still cannot open it, the cause is somewhere between you and the site.
Worked example
Suppose you enter example.com and the site sends bare-domain visitors to its www address. The checker adds https://, receives a 301 redirect, follows it to https://www.example.com/ and gets 200 OK back. The verdict is “Up”, with 1 redirect followed. The whole check, including the extra hop, took 412 ms, of which the final server needed 268 ms to answer.
What each result means
| Result | Verdict | What it usually means |
|---|---|---|
| 200–299 | Up | The server answered normally. |
| 301, 302, 307, 308 | Followed | The page moved; the checker reports the status of the last address. |
| 401, 403 | Up, with an error | The server works but refuses the request, often because a firewall blocks unfamiliar visitors. |
| 404, 410 | Up, with an error | The server works but this address does not exist. |
| 429 | Up, with an error | Rate limited: too many requests from one source. |
| 500–504 | Down | The web application or a proxy in front of it has failed. |
| 520–530 | Down | Cloudflare could not get an answer from the site’s own server. |
| Timeout, DNS or connection error | Down | No usable answer within 8 seconds, or no server to talk to. |
Why a site can work for us and fail for you
A local problem looks exactly like an outage from your chair. The usual causes are an old DNS answer cached by your router or computer, a company or school firewall, a VPN exit in a blocked country, a browser extension that blocks scripts, or an IPv6 route that is broken only on your network. Try the site on mobile data, in a private window, or after restarting the router. If the checker says “Down” too, the problem is on the site’s side, and the status code tells its owner where to look first.
Key features
- Status code with its standard name, response time and redirect count.
- Final address after redirects, and the server software when the site reveals it.
- Plain explanations for timeouts, DNS failures and refused connections.
- Results you can copy, and a link that reopens the same check.