What to Do When You Cannot Open a Particular Website

Your computer is connected to the Internet but you are unable to open a particular website though all the other sites are loading without issues.

For instance, you can open yahoo.com and bing.com but it takes forever to load www.google.com even though the site is up for everyone else in the world.

How to Troubleshoot your Internet Connection

Step 0: Like with everything else, switch off the modem, restart the computer, and turn on the modem again. Also clear the Internet cookies and browser cache. Problem gone? No, proceed to the next step.

Step 1: Temporarily disable your computer’s firewall and close any anti-virus software that may be running in the background. If you are now able to access the websites that were previously not loading, your security program is causing the problem. As as workaround, you can add that site to the “trusted” zone in Internet Explorer and see if it works.

Step 2: Open your hosts file and see if there are any entries for sites that are currently unreachable from your computer. The hosts file is located in the following folder:

c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Step 3: Try a remote screen capture using Aviary. For instance, if the URL of the error site is abc.com, try opening aviary.com/http://abc.com in your browser. This will help you make sure that the site you are trying to access is not down at the source.

Step 4: Clear your DNS cache and run the ping and traceroute commands against the problematic site to make sure that it is not an ISP specific issue.

ipconfig /flushdns
tracert www.error-website.com
ping www.error-website.com

If the DNS server is an issue, you can easily switch to Google DNS or OpenDNS without having to call the ISP’s support. However, if the ping and traceroute connections are successful but the sites remain unreachable, proceed to the next step.

Step 5. Reset the modem to factory defaults and re-configure it with the same username and password that was provided by the ISP. You can reset the modem by pressing a pin inside the hole located at the back of the modem for about 10 seconds. Or you can call your ISP support and let them guide you through the steps over phone.

The last step is very likely to fix your internet connectivity problem.
Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.