This particular page is about locating help for when your site, email or something else goes on the fritz with your web site.

Face it, this is an electronic age and as such things can go south fast. From a routing connection located who knows where to a glitch at your ISP (Internet Service Provider) to a re-boot at your hosting provider…anything can and will happen. Usually not at the most opportune time either.

First, lets go over a couple things terminology wise.
Your ISP is NOT your hosting provider. This would be a common misunderstanding. Your ISP is your Internet Service Provider who creates the connection for you to access the internet. They have nothing to do with your hosting provider.

Your hosting provider is the company you utilize to “host” your website, email, databases, etc. so that others on the internet can access them too. Whether it’s your online business or a personal site, your hosting provider is the one that keeps everything together for you on your account.

Now, keeping all this in mind, the way the two entities work together is usually pretty good. You pay your ISP for a connection to the internet. You pay your hosting provider to store your web site so that you and others may access it. If all goes as planned (which it usually does) life is grand. But, when it doesn’t…what to do?

This is where a little investigative creativity comes into play.

When a glitch occurs and before making that phone call to either your ISP or the hosting company, see if anything has changed recently.

Let’s start with email for an example.

You notice that you’ve not received anything in a while. No incoming email at all. It was working just fine earlier this morning but not this afternoon. Well, instead of panicking, let’s see where the trouble may lie first.

Is the email account from your ISP or your hosting provider? If it’s your ISP then a quick call may be in order but before you do, try an alternate email account to test with first. Try sending yourself an email from another email account (preferably not the same as the one affected) like Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail to name a few.

Email the affected account to see if you get any bounce messages. These will be useful when you do call concerning the problem. Also, try emailing the alternate account to make sure that the outgoing email is also not affected.

More and more ISP’s these days are only allowing outgoing email to originate from their servers to help control spam and other security issues. So this may be an issue either now or at a later date.

Assuming the outgoing email is ok and the incoming still doesn’t work, it’s time to contact your ISP or hosting provider for help as they are better trained to deal with these issues and can usually correct them quickly. Remember to include everything you’ve learned so they may be able to locate the problem as fast as possible for you.

Now, a lot of us experience slow loading times for our web site’s pages at times. This isn’t necessarily the fault of the hosting provider as some would suspect. There is a lot of routing between you and the server your pages are hosted on and a quick check will reveal where the problem may be. I’ll explain below.

Try a traceroute doing the following:

Windows XP/2000
1. Go to Start > Run…
2. Enter cmd and click OK.
3. At the prompt, type tracert yourdomainname and hit enter.

Windows ME/98/98SE
1. Go to Start > Run…
2. Enter command and click OK.
3. At the prompt, type tracert yourdomainname and hit enter.

Now from these results you’ll be able to see all the routing that you have between you and your hosting provider. Any “timeouts” will show as asterisks “*” which are serious slowdowns due to a routing issue or some other technical issue. Either way you should now contact your hosting provider with this information so they can look into it for you.

There are other tests that can be conducted but they should be done at the request of your hosting provider as they would be specific to certain results needed for a solution to the issue.

The main thing here is to check into a few things first before making a call for help. It will make the resolution much faster too.

A lot of hosting providers have a Knowledge Base or Tutorials for users to check out for specific help with their issues. These are updated regularly to continue adding to the base of information to assist their users.

So remember that the next time a glitch occurs, try a little investigating before placing that call. It very well may lead to a quicker resolution to the problem at hand.