Best Online Tools For Troubleshooting a Website

In the Web Hosting business, a Linux System Administrator requires some skills and the best online tools for troubleshooting a Website.

In this tutorial, I will show you the online tools I use for troubleshoot webpages and you will learn, hopefully, how to use them to fix many issues.

Global DNS Propagation Checker / DNS issues

Is quiet common in webhosting, the troubles caused by a wrong DNS setup, or due the time it takes to propagate globally.

As you make know, the DNS propagation is the time it takes for DNS changes to be updated across the Internet.

To clarify, this process can take from a few minutes up to 48 hours. Therefore, it is important that you have a way to track it.

After all that explanation, I recommend you to use the free DNS propagation checker tool from WhatsMyDNS.

It’s simple to use, just write your domain’s website and select the type of record that you want to validate, the A record is selected by default, then click on “Search” and wait for the result.

With the result, you can see your DNS resolution around the world. This is one of my online tools for troubleshooting a Website. It should be in your Bookmark for future references.

Website slowness troubleshooting

The best way to start troubleshooting a slow loading website is from inside the server, if you have ssh access, you can use the command line “top” to make sure that the cpu load is lower than your max number of processors “nproc“.

Also, it is important to keep an eye on the i/o waits, you can view the io usage with “iostat -x 1“, this could be related to swaping due low free memory, run “free -m” to check it.

At last but not least, take a look into the network activity using “ss -s” and “netstat -tanep“, hopefully your site is not under DDoS attack. I’ll write a guide for How to mitigate a DDoS attack.

If everything looks good from inside, it’s time now to check from the outside. You can start by tracing route or ping the host server, we would be looking for timeouts or high time replies.

$ traceroute YOUR_SERVER
$ ping YOUR_SERVER

Once you ruled out all from the above, it’s time to get into the application level trouble shoot. I recommend you to use the free online tool from GTmetrix, you will see how your site performs, reveal why it’s slow and discover optimization opportunities.

Just input your website’s url in the field and Click on the “Test your site” button, it takes a few seconds to process and it will display all the performance metrics related to your site loading and the time score.

It will give you some advise about how to improve your loading time and it will help you to identify why is your website taking so long to load.

Conclusion

If you to want learn more about this tutorial or have any questions, feel free to send your comments down below.

Don’t forget to check our other Tutorials, we are constantly submitting new ones every week.

Linux Admin Geeks