Who makes CheckWebsiteNow, and how.

Who runs CheckWebsiteNow

CheckWebsiteNow is a small, independent project, operated by one person:

There is no company, no editorial team and no investor behind it. The same person writes the pages, keeps the data current and runs the server, which is why the pages say what they can and cannot prove instead of sounding like a monitoring product. The legally binding operator details are in the imprint; corrections are welcome through the contact page.

The reason this site exists is simple. When a website does not open, the first question is whether the problem is the website or your own connection, and most answers on the internet are either a graph of other people’s complaints or an advertisement. This service tries to answer that one question honestly, with a measurement you can see the limits of, and then hand you free steps that actually fix the common cases.

How the check works

When you start a check, our server asks the website’s HTTPS homepage for a response and reads only the response headers. It resolves the public name, follows at most five verified HTTPS redirects, and gives up after ten seconds. It never signs in, never submits a form, never runs the page’s scripts and never reads the page content. The result is one of a few plain answers: the homepage answered, it forwarded us somewhere we could not safely follow, it refused our automated request, it answered with an error status, its name did not resolve, its certificate did not verify, or it did not answer in time.

Every measurement comes from one measurement point, a single self-hosted probe. That single fact sets the limit of everything on this site. A service can answer us and still be broken for you, because your network, your name servers and your region are not ours; and a service can refuse our automated request while working perfectly in your browser. That is why our wording is “this is what we saw”, never “this service is down worldwide”. The method, the colours and every limit are written out on the how it works page, and the same values are machine-readable through the public API.

How these pages are made

There are two kinds of pages here, and they are made differently.

The error guides are written by hand, one message at a time, from the browser and vendor documentation plus practical testing. Each page lists its sources and the date it was last updated, so you can check the claim rather than trust it.

The service pages are generated from a reviewed data file by a template, and it is fair that you know it. The layout, the “how this check works” block and the per-category checklist come from that template. The parts that make a page worth reading do not: the description of how that service typically fails, the list of typical problems and their links to the matching error guide, and the official status and help links are written, checked and dated by a person before release. Nothing on a service page is published as unreviewed machine output, and the measurement itself is never generated at all — it is measured when you open the page.

Official status links are verified by hand. A link only appears when the service’s own domain leads to it, and the page shows the date we checked plus a note on how it was proven. Where we could not verify such a page, we say so in that exact sentence and keep the page out of search results instead of linking a community-run tracker and calling it official. We would rather show less than imply more.

Editorial and advertising policy

Free steps come first on every page, before any paid link. Advertising pays for the server: Google AdSense code runs on every page, and labelled partner offers can appear. Every paid link carries a visible “Ad” label, a disclosure sentence and rel="sponsored", and no advertisement is ever placed inside or above a measurement result. The VPN comparison is ordered by documented, checkable criteria, never by commission, and a provider cannot buy a place in it or a better write-up. Nobody pays to be listed as a service, and nobody pays to have a problem removed from a page. What advertising does and which data Google receives is set out in the advertising section of the imprint.

What this service does not do

• No worldwide verdict. One measurement point cannot prove a global outage, and we never claim one.
• No history and no uptime figures. A service page shows the latest single observation with its time, nothing more.
• No monitoring or alerting. We will not watch a service for you or tell you when it recovers. For that, use a monitoring product.
• No user-report graphs. We do not count “reports in the last hour”, because those numbers are easy to game and hard to read.
• No access to anything of yours. No accounts, no logs, no devices. We cannot repair another company’s service or speak to it for you.
• No guarantee. The service is free, limited and offered as it is; the checks and the guides can be wrong, and corrections are welcome.

Report a mistake on a page → · Read the full method and limits →