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Support - Ping

Ping is a command that will send packets of data to a destination, and report whether they do or do not return. Some servers have pinging disabled. Adhost’s shared servers have pinging enabled.

Pinging is a useful utility to help find out if a domain is reachable (possible server or connection outage) or whether data is getting lost in transit. Ping will also use the pinging machines DNS to resolve a name to an IP address and troubleshoot possible DNS errors.

To ping, open your command prompt and type: ping domain.com You will then see one of many results:

In this example below we are pinging an IP address and all packets are returned. The server 216.211.128.33 is up, active and responding.

In this example a domain is pinged and after the DNS looks up the IP address, data is sent to that server. The domain adhost.com resides on machine 216.211.128.39.

In this example the machine that the domain is on is unreachable. The server could be down, connections in between could be down or the server could have pinging disabled (The latter is true in this case). You might see a message like: "ping domain.com (100.100.100.100): Communication prohibited by filter".

In this example, DNS cannot resolve the domain someotherdomain.net, so there is an "Unknown host" error. See our page on DNS and domains for more info.

Remember that if you are connected to another machine via a shell account (telnet, ssh) you are pinging from that machine, not your local machine. If you are on a Windows machine, you can ping from the DOS command line.