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When troubleshooting availability issues, it's common to hear "it works on my end." However, this response often masks real problems that affect actual users. Several factors can create a false sense of reliability from an internal perspective.
Cached DNS records on your local machine or corporate network may still point to a working server, while public DNS has already propagated to a failing endpoint. VPN connections can route your traffic through internal networks that bypass public-facing infrastructure issues entirely.
Active sessions and cookies may keep you authenticated and served from cache, while new visitors encounter login walls or stale content. Browser cache and CDN edge nodes can also serve you old, working versions of pages that no longer exist on the origin server.
This check runs from an external server with no prior relationship to your site. It performs a fresh DNS lookup, establishes a new connection, and requests your page without any cached credentials or session data. The result reflects what a first-time visitor would experience.
A single external check serves as a quick diagnostic tool in specific situations. It's not a replacement for monitoring, but it provides immediate clarity when you need it.
This tool performs a single HTTP request from an external server and reports whether your site responded successfully. It tells you the status code, response time, and final URL after redirects. This is useful for quick verification and basic diagnostics.
However, a single check has inherent limitations. It cannot detect intermittent failures that happen between checks. It doesn't track performance trends over time or alert you when something goes wrong. It only tests from one geographic region, so it won't reveal regional availability issues.
Think of this as a quick diagnostic aid, similar to taking your temperature once. It can confirm or rule out an immediate problem, but it's not a substitute for ongoing health monitoring. For production services, continuous monitoring with alerting, historical data, and multi-region coverage provides the visibility you need to maintain reliability.
Understanding how to verify your site's availability from an external viewpoint is a fundamental skill for anyone responsible for a web service. Our guide covers the key concepts, common pitfalls, and practical approaches to answering the question: "Is my site actually up for users?"
Read the guide: How to check if your site is actually up for usersWhen you run an uptime check, you get several key pieces of information about your website's availability and performance. The status code tells you whether your server responded successfully (200 means OK, while codes like 500 or 503 indicate server errors). The response time shows how long it took for your server to respond to our request, measured in milliseconds.
We also show you the final URL after any redirects. Many sites redirect from HTTP to HTTPS, or from non-www to www versions. Understanding these redirects helps you verify your site configuration is correct. The check is timestamped in UTC so you know exactly when the measurement was taken.
Your site may be accessible from Europe but down for users in Asia or the Americas due to CDN or DNS routing problems.
DNS changes can take time to propagate globally. Some users may still be routed to old servers.
A single check might succeed while your site is experiencing sporadic outages that affect many requests.
Your server might respond to our check but be too slow for real users, causing timeouts on their end.
CDNs or proxies may be serving cached error pages to users while your origin server has recovered.
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