It is happened to the best of us: we load up the computer to visit our favorite website and instead of being greeted with the familiar homepage, we get a 404 or connection error message. Before the withdrawal symptoms set in, it is always nice to know if the reason you can’t access the website is because you have a connection problem and you can fix it or because your favorite website truly is down and it is out of your control. DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com is a website that allows us to do just:

DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com allows users to enter in a website URL (enter the website URL where it says “google.com” and hit “Enter” or click on “or just me?” after you have entered the website URL) and then it checks to see if it can access the website associated with the URL that was entered. If it can, it tells you so:

If it can’t, it tells you so:

Depending on which result you get, you can figure out if the problem is at your end or at the website’s end.

One quick tip when using DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com is if you want to quickly check if a website is up or not, you can simply do http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/[INSERT WEBSITE URL] and go directly to checking the website instead of landing at the DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com homepage. For example, I can go to http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com, type in dotTech.org, and get the result or I can go to http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/dottech.org and get the result directly. Or, you can use a simple bookmarklet (created by Jermey):

javascript:window.open(“http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/”+window.location.hostname);void%200

To use the bookmarklet, create a bookmark on the bookmark bar and enter the above code in the “location” or “URL” section. Then, whenever you visit a website that you think is down, click on the bookmarklet and it will automatically enter the website’s URL in DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com and display the result for you.

DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com is a very handy tool. I use it all the time when I have connection problems with dotTech. It allows me to find out if it is because my ISP sucks or if my website truly is down in which case I go yell at my webhost. I am sure everyone will find it very useful also.