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Hosting or Server Outage: How to Tell and What to Do

If DNS is resolving correctly but the site still times out or returns a server error, the problem usually sits with your hosting provider rather than your domain configuration.

How to confirm it's hosting, not DNS

Run a check against your domain: if it reports that the connection was made but the server didn't respond correctly (a timeout after connecting, or a 5xx status code), that points to the server or hosting layer rather than DNS, which would instead fail to resolve at all.

Where to look

• Your host's status page. Most hosting providers and platforms (Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, Netlify, AWS, DigitalOcean, and so on) publish a live status page listing ongoing incidents by region and service.
• Your hosting dashboard. Check for a specific outage or configuration error on your own account — a failed deployment, a suspended account for billing reasons, or a build that didn't complete.
• Server logs, if you have shell or dashboard access, which often show the exact error (out of memory, crashed process, disk full) behind a generic error page.

What you can do

If it's a provider-wide outage

There's rarely anything to fix on your end beyond waiting. Subscribe to the provider's status page for updates, and avoid redeploying repeatedly, which can sometimes make queued recoveries slower.

If it's isolated to your account

Check for a failed or stuck deployment and try redeploying the last known good version. Confirm the account isn't suspended for a billing or usage issue. If you're on a VPS you manage yourself, check whether the web server process (nginx, Apache, Node, etc.) is actually running.

If it keeps happening

Recurring outages on the same host are worth escalating with support, or weighing whether it's time to move to a more reliable tier or provider.