Server is unavailable

It is always great to have a remote server on the far end in order to fulfill your personal or business needs that require local presence. We offer virtual and dedicated servers in our Hosting all over the world that may cover all your needs.

However, having a remote server also implies that you can only access it via the Internet. That's why in case you face some issues with its availability, troubleshooting it will differ from doing the same with your PC, for example, which is available for you locally.

Therefore, in this article we will address the issue of servers' unavailability, list possible reasons behind it and dive into details with each of it.

1. Check the server's status in the panel

The simplest initial step to troubleshoot the issue is to check the state of the server in our Hosting panel. For example, it could be suspended from our side due to non-payment. In this case the server will be unavailable until you top up your balance and it gets re-activated.

It also makes sense to check the VMmanager/DCImanager control panel (depends on the type of the server you have issues with: virtual or dedicated respectively). It could possibly be that due to your previous actions it can be shut down and you just need to start it.

If in any of the panels you see some other status and it is unclear to you what it means, feel free to reach out to our Technical Support team.

2. Ping globally and locally

It doesn't matter if the server is unavailable for you right after the purchase or it suddenly becomes unavailable after some time of usage - as a first step, you need to check on its availability around the globe and on its availability from your side.

Let's take a look on how you can do that:

• Run ping command from your PC

All that you need to do is just to open the terminal (Win+R on Windows, Ctrl-Alt+T on Linux (Ubuntu)) and enter the following:

ping 'server's IP'

If the output shows 100% packet loss, please, proceed to the next step. If there is some packet loss, but some of the packets were received as well, please, follow our article for troubleshooting the packet loss.

• Check ping globally

Nowadays there are many tools that allow to check ping globally. In our example we will be using such a tool as ping.pe.

All that you need to do is to paste your server's IP in the search bar. After that, the tool will perform ping towards your server from multiple locations around the world that they have available.

If in most of the locations the server will respond to ping, but not for you locally, it means that the server itself is working fine and is accessible.

With that, please, proceed to the next step.

• Define the source of the issue

In order to check where the issue originates, you would need to perform mtr command. We have a separate guide on how to do that, you can find it here.

Additionally, you can also expand ping results from ping.pe into mtrs which is quite helpful and review our article regarding packet loss issues where we described in details on how to understand the mtr outputs.

Once mtr towards the server's IP is done you need to check at which hop the trace gets stuck. The ISP that owns the IP at this hop is the one who is responsible for the connection not going through.

For example:

If you can't reach the server's IP address from China, it could be just that the server's IP is blocked by the Great Chinese Firewall, i.e. by Chinese local ISP.

Please, note that we aren't responsible for local ISP limitations as it is out of our area of responsibility and we can't influence such restrictions (MSA, clause 6.3, section (e)).

In such cases you may contact the responsible ISP and ask them to unblock the server's IP or you can also try to solve this issue by purchasing additional IP addresses. New IP can possibly be not blocked by the same ISP, however, we can't guarantee that since the block is occurring outside of our network.

3. Check the connection to the server and its network settings

If according to the previous steps everything is alright, but you still can't connect the server or you just want to continue with further diagnostics, please, check the following:

• Connection to the server via SSH/RDP

All our servers can be connected via SSH/RDP by default and the protocol to be chosen depends on the OS installed on the server. Servers on Linux operation systems should be connected via SSH and servers on Windows should be connected via RDP. Feel free to follow the linked guides and to try the recommended option for your operation system.

For our OS templates all needed packages are already pre-configured and mentioned methods should work right away. If you have our OS template installed, but the connectivity doesn't work, please, move to the next point.

If you have installed the OS from an ISO image, you might be required to set up the network configuration and this would solely depend on the chosen image. Otherwise, the server could be unavailable.

To find the required settings, open our Hosting panel, choose your server and click IP addresses:

Check the IP address, the network mask and the default gateway and ensure you configure the same within the operation system.

• Connection to the server via VNC

In case the connection via SSH/RDP didn't work for you as well as ping, you need to ensure if the server itself is functioning properly or not. This can be achieved by trying to connect to it via VNC console.

VNC (Virtual Network Computing) allows you to view and control a remote computer’s desktop. VNC works by sending graphics data of the mouse and keyboard input between client and server applications, using the Remote Frame Buffer protocol. This allows you to be able to use such type of connectivity even in case the server is not available via the Internet by any other means.

In order to connect your server via VNC, please, us the following instructions:

for virtual servers on VMmanager 5;

for virtual servers on VMmanager 6;

for dedicated servers.

Note: for dedicated servers there is an article attached explaining how to connect the server's IPMI. In order to open the VNC console some additional actions are required and they will differ depending on the IPMI version used. If you experience any issues with it, please, contact our Technical Support team for further clarifications.

If VNC console works properly and you are able to log into the server using it, it means that the server itself is fine, but it is the connectivity via the Internet that doesn't work.

With that in mind, please, try to recall if you have made any recent changes in network settings of the server as the issue could originate there. Once defined, you can revert the changes having connected via VNC and, thus, restore the server's availability,

If you don't remember or are unsure how to do that, you can always simply re-install the OS on your server (example on how to do that for the virtual server on VMmanager 6) and this should solve the issue.

In case VNC console doesn't work and you are unable to use it, it could be an issue on our side and you need to contact our Technical Support team to solve it.

4. Check our Status Page

Managing a global infrastructure always implies the possibility of some incidents occurring and the need for performing maintenances from time to time. We are doing our best in order to minimize the downtime for end customers, but it also makes sense to check our Status page for any incidents/maintenances ongoing in case of sudden unavailability of your server.

Both incidents and maintenance events posted on our Status Page include the details of the event and the timeframe when it occured/should occur. If there is some event ongoing, please, wait until it is resolved and check the server once again.

If needed you can subscribe to the events related to some particular service of ours in the exact locations and always stay updated for the required events!

5. Possible DDoS

Nowadays online hosts are highly exposed to be harmed from the Internet and be a subject to a DDoS-attack, for example.

But don't worry! All the servers in our Hosting have our Basic DDoS protection enabled and with that possible harm to your data is significantly reduced.

With this protection enabled, if a DDoS-attack is imposed on your server and the protection's threshold limit is reached, the server's IP will be null-routed for 12 hours (the count starts from the time the attack ends) and you will be notified from our side once it happens over the e-mail you specified in Hosting panel during registration.

The threshold limits are below:

• For virtual servers: an attack exceeding 5 Gbit/s or 200,000 pp/s (IP packets per second).
• For dedicated servers: an attack exceeding 5 Gbit/s. There is no pp/s restriction.

This will prevent server's breakdown and data corruption and will help you to stay on the safe side, but it also could be reason for a temporary unavailability of your server via the Internet (though you are still able to access it via VNC).

If you would like to upgrade the level of DDoS protection for your server, for example to apply custom ACL and/or traffic filtering, please, check out this page on our website. 

Note: Advanced protection is applicable to dedicated servers only.

6. Additional IPs

If you can’t ping an additional IP address, make sure that you have configured it on your server because by default only the main IPs come pre-configured from our side. You can also configure all your additional IPs automatically having re-installed the OS of your server.

These were the main reasons that could stay behind your server's unavailability and are worth checking. If you have checked everything and still face some issue not covered by the article or just have additional questions, feel free to reach out to our Technical Support team.