Does your server appear to be offline? You’re not receiving emails or getting errors? Can’t log into your control panel or make an FTP connection?

When you can’t connect to your server, you definitely need to get the issue resolved. There are several things you can do to help us getting a clearer picture of what is happening. The faster this information is gathered, the faster we can help you get reconnected and working again. Help us help you!

Can You Access Any Service on Your Server?

Are you able to get to your website in a web browser? If you can’t, or if the connection times out, it’s possible that your local IP address has been blocked by your server’s firewall. Typically, this is the result of too many failed connection attempts (through cPanel, SSH, FTP, email, etc.) over a brief period of time.

To confirm, you can check your site via a service such as IsItDownRightNow (simply enter the URL of your website into the search field) to see whether the site appears down for the rest of the Internet or if it is only you, or try to visit your website via another network, such as from a phone or tablet over its cellular connection.
If an IP block is suspected (meaning you can’t access the server but others can), and you have a Dedicated, Storm, or VPS Linux server running the CSF firewall, you can unblock your IP address directly from your Liquid Web account dashboard (see Unblocking Your IP Address). If you are running a different system, we can log into the server on your behalf and clear the block on your IP address. If you’re able to confirm that your IP is not blocked, we can check the server logs for any specific errors associated with your connection attempt, or investigate into any possible network issues between your physical location and the server’s that could be preventing you from accessing it.
To speed up that process, when opening your support request, please try to include your public IPV4 IP address (which you can obtain at our IP checker, so that our Support team can help resolve the issue as quickly as possible. Please also include any error messages you’ve received when attempting to connect.

Are There Any Signs of a Network Issue?

Sometimes heavy traffic on the Internet, a regional outage or another network issue can be a factor. If you suspect a network issue (or want to try to rule out the possibility), the best diagnostic step is to provide a traceroute from your computer to the server.

Traceroute is a very powerful tool that provides a step by step representation of how traffic is traveling from your local computer to the server. Should you see asterisks (“lost packets”) in your traceroute, that might indicate network congestion or outages at the hop where you see the asterisk.
If you need help running a traceroute, you can find a helpful article here.
Having that information at the time we begin our investigation will simplify the process and also avoid any unnecessary delays associated with requesting the information later via your support case.