Website will not ping, is there an outage on the server?

Sometimes pinging your website, or any other free hosting-related server or IP address, will very fail with 100% packet loss.

The output on Windows will seem as follows:

> ping example.com

 

Pinging example.com [185.27.134.??] with 32 bytes of data:

Request timed out.

Request timed out.

Request timed out.

Request timed out.

 

Ping statistics for 185.27.134.??:

    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

 

Is this a sign that the server is down?

No, failure to ping a server does not imply that it is unavailable.

Ping queries and responses are supported by many computers and servers to test the system's connection quality. Ping queries fail if the server is unavailable.

Ping communication to and from a machine or network can, however, be blocked using firewall rules. If this is the case, pinging the server will fail, but other services (such as web traffic) will continue to function normally.

Our servers' firewalls are configured to restrict ping traffic. This was done for security and to prevent information about our network from being leaked.

Many computers and servers allow ping requests and responses to verify the connection quality to the system. If the server is down, then the ping requests fail.

However, it’s possible with firewall rules to block ping traffic to and from a system or network. If that’s the case, then pinging the server will not work but other services (like web traffic) will be unaffected and work as usual.

Our servers have such firewalling setup to block ping traffic. This was done for security and to prevent exposing details about our network.

In brief, if you know the server is configured to react to pings, ping not working suggests the server is down. Our servers are not set up to reply to ping requests.