My dedicated server isn't responding. What do I check first?

About ten minutes. Work through these in order, and you'll usually find the culprit or hand us a much better ticket.

Steps

You'll need your server's Main IP. It's in your welcome email and on your service page in the portal.

1. Check it isn't just your connection. Try to reach something running on the server (your website, or a service like SSH or RDP) from a different network. Your phone on mobile data works for a website. If it loads there but not on your home or office connection, the problem is between you and us, not the server.
2. Check the service in the portal. Log in at https://noc.versaweb.com, click Services, and open your server. Look at the Status. Then check Invoices for anything unpaid.

3. Run tests from two places and keep both sets of results. Comparing them tells us whether the trouble is on your ISP's side or ours.

   • From your own network. Run a ping and a traceroute (or MTR):

     • Linux or macOS: ping -c 4 YOUR.MAIN.IP and mtr -rw -c 20 YOUR.MAIN.IP (or traceroute YOUR.MAIN.IP)
     • Windows: ping YOUR.MAIN.IP and tracert YOUR.MAIN.IP

   • From outside your network. A third-party tool tests from servers around the world. Use any one of these, enter your Main IP, and run a ping and an MTR:

     • https://globalping.io
     • https://ping.pe
     • https://mtr.tools

     Copy the text or save the link to the results.

4. Try a different way in. If ping works but SSH or RDP doesn't, a firewall rule (yours, csf, fail2ban) may be blocking your own IP. Try from a second network.
5. Look at the console, if you have IPMI/KVM access. A black screen, a boot error, or a disk check waiting for a keypress tells us a lot.

6. Open a ticket under Technical Support. Include:

   • your Main IP
   • when it stopped responding
   • what you've tried, plus both sets of results from step 3 (your own network and the third-party tool)
   • anything you changed recently (updates, firewall rules, reboots)

If it didn't work

A server that stays down after these checks usually needs someone with hands on hardware. Open the ticket and we'll pick it up; the NOC is staffed 24/7. Please reply to your existing ticket instead of opening new ones, so everything stays in one thread.