The Help Centers

I’m not sure because I can’t get to it.  Is it ME?  I get these questions often by phone in a panic.  The first thing I do is open a browser to the site.  More often than not the site is up.  To prevent some of the support calls you might make try a couple of things first.  A good thing to try is pressing Ctrl-F5.  While clicking reload/refresh or pressing F5 will refresh a page, pressing Ctrl-F5 goes a bit farther and skips some of the local caches.  This may be all you need to do but if not you may have to dig a bit deeper.

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First off double check that your have an internet connection.  Go to http://google.com, http://thehelpcenters.com to see if you’re still able to get to the internet.  If not then it’s something with your internet connection.  Try restarting your router/modem  and/or disconnect and reconnect to the internet.  There are so many different configurations I can’t really say what to do specifically in your situation but unplugging your modem/router and replugging it in after about 10 seconds should do it.

Now if your internet connection is working fine lets try and eliminate a few other problems.

Lets try and ping the website.  First get to a command prompt. Here are instructions on opening a command prompt.  Now when you have a prompt type in ping and the website name.  Below is what you SHOULD get (for this website at least)

This basically shows that the IP address is alive and working and you can get to it.  The time part of the output is how fast your connection to the server is.  A VERY high number may show some network congestion.  Check if you’re downloading or uploading a lot at the time.  Also if you get a number by Lost that is greater than 0 then you might have a problem with your connection or the server is having trouble.

At this point it might be a problem with your DNS Cache in Windows.  DNS is a way to convert domain names like thehelpcenters.com that people understand to IP address that networks understand.  To help speed things up Windows has a DNS cache that stores some of this information.   So to fix this problem and if you’ve gotten a domain name or new hosting recently and want to update the cache we can flush the DNS. Just type ipconfig /flushdns at a command prompt.

This resets the cache and then may help you connect to the server.  It helps if you shut down any program that accesses the Internet before doing this (e.g. Outlook, Internet Explorer, Thunderbird) as they have internal caches of this information and may not reflect the cleared cache.

Finally try a reboot of your computer.  Sometimes things just get stuck.

Now if all of this does not work it may be a bit more troublesome.  Try using http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com which will check the site from it’s end.  This should show if the server is down for everyone or if it’s just you.

I hope these tips have helped.  Let me know if you have any questions or comments on quick troubleshooting techniques for network connections.