If you discover that you are unable to access one or more of our services, such as either your email, your website or our homepage, this guide will help you to deduce where the problem lies. In fact, it’s useful for diagnosing a number of different network problems, including faults with your modem/router or ISP, so it’s well worth keeping a copy.

Tip: It’s well worth downloading this guide using the link above and keeping it safe, in case you are unable to get to it when you really need it.

Planned Service Interruptions

Before assuming that there is an unexpected fault with yours or our network, please check our Service Status page at http://status.onewebking.com for any planned maintenance. Usually we are able to keep services running during these times, but sometimes an outage is unavoidable. If we’ve logged it there already, then we are sorry for the inconvenience and hope that you will bear with us while we work hard to resume the service as quickly as possible.

Unplanned Service Interruptions

If we have not published an official notice about an outage, then you may have discovered a problem that we are not yet aware of. Use an availability testing website such as isitup.org to determine whether www.onewebking.com is “up” for everyone else, by going to http://isitup.org/www.onewebking.com.

The “up” response above shows that our web services are running as expected, but problems could still be affecting email or other services. Continue with the tests below if issues exist for you.

If this shows that our web services are “down”, then we would be very grateful if you would email us directly at support ‘at’ onewebking.comso that we can begin work on resolving it. Of course, you may need to use a third-party webmail service, such as gmail.com, if you can’t connect to your mailbox.

Ping Network Utility

The command-line application, ping, is very useful for pinpointing where a fault exists along the path between source and destination network devices (ie computers). It does this by sending packets and reporting whether they were successfully returned by the target. If it doesn’t receive a “reply” then it will report the reason (often, “Request timed out”).

The command accepts arguments in the following format:

ping <IP address>
ping <hostname or domain>

Note that ping should always be typed in lower-case letters.

Diagnostics using Ping

Step 1

  1. On Windows, launch the Command Prompt by clicking on the circular Windows Start Button and typing “command prompt” in the “Search programs and files” text field. When it appears in the results, as shown in the screenshot below, click it to begin. Mac OS X users will need to launch a Terminal instead.

Step 2

  1. When the Command Prompt appears, either copy the following lines of code and right-click on the Command Prompt to paste, or manually type them in and press return to run them
    ping 8.8.8.8
    ping google.com
    ping onewebking.com
    
  2. Press the return key again, to ensure that the last command was executed

Step 3

  1. The result will resemble the following 3 successful results. Notice that we have also included another ping 8.8.8.8 at the end, to show you what a failure looks like:

Interpreting Ping Results

Step 1

ping 8.8.8.8

When you ping the host with the IP address, 8.8.8.8, it indicates whether you are able to communicate with the Internet at all. At the top of our screenshot above, you can see that the ping command successfully received a reply to the 4 packets it sent. This means that the test has passed.

At the bottom of the screenshot, we ping 8.8.8.8 again, but this time it reports 4 “Request timed out” notifications. This test failed. As this is the most basic ping test we can perform, the cause must be quite fundamental. If you see this, you should check whether your local machine, modem/router and phoneline are connected and working correctly. If these are all OK, you may need to contact your ISP for assistance.

Step 2

ping google.com

When you ping a host or domain name, like google.com as we have in our screenshot, the local system uses DNS (Domain Name Service) to translate the human-readable name to an IP address that it can understand. If this fails, you should fix your DNS issue before proceeding to the next step.

Step 3

ping onewebking.com

Following successes with the previous steps and if you are still having problems with connecting to some aspect of our service, then a success or failure when you ping onewebking.com can be indicative of different causes of the problem.

  1. Failure: If isitup.org reports that our servers are “up” for everyone else, but ping returns a “Request timed out” for you, then our network may have detected some suspicious activity from your IP address at some point, and blocked it automatically to protect itself. Please lookup your current public IP address at whatismyip.com and send it to us at support ‘at’ onewebking.com and we will remove the block and investigate the specific cause so that you can correct it.
  2. Success: If ping reports a “Reply from…” from our servers, but you are still having issues, please send the results of all the tests you have performed here to support ‘at’ onewebking.com and we will gladly help.