Server diagnostics: find out what is wrong in 10 seconds, before you open a ticket

Your server does not answer, your site will not load, SSH times out. The first question is always the same: is it my problem or yours? Until now, finding out meant opening a ticket and waiting for someone on our team to check the same things you can now check yourself, in a few seconds.

In the DeluxHost Cloud panel every VPS and dedicated server has a new card: Something wrong?, with a Diagnose server button.

The "Something wrong?" card on the server page

What it checks

One click starts six checks. You see them tick by while the panel works:

The checks running

• Server state: whether the server is running, powered off, suspended or being reinstalled, and whether its last installation completed.
• Host: whether the physical machine your VPS runs on is responding normally or is in maintenance.
• Known incidents: whether an incident or maintenance open on the status page affects your host or location.
• Network: how many IP addresses are assigned, whether public IPv4/IPv6 traffic is switched on, and whether the server answers a ping from our network.
• Platform: whether the platform that manages your server can be reached.
• Recent operations: starts, stops, restarts and reinstalls in the last 7 days, and whether any of them failed or got stuck.

These are read-only checks: the diagnosis does not log into your server, does not read your files and changes nothing. It only looks at what we already know about your machine.

How to read the result

The verdict is at the top, with every check below it. When everything is fine, it looks like this:

A clean diagnosis: every check OK

Each check has one of four states: OK, Attention, Problem or Unknown. When something is off, the panel sums it up at the top and tells you what to do. Here, for example, the server is simply powered off:

A diagnosis with a warning: the server is powered off

A few things worth knowing:

• No reply to a ping does not mean "server down". Plenty of firewalls drop ICMP on purpose: the diagnosis reports it as Unknown, not as a failure.
• If the problem is ours, we already know. When a host stops responding or the platform cannot be reached, our team gets an automatic alert: there is nothing you need to do.
• If an incident is open, the check names it and points you to the status page: no need to open a ticket to report it.

If you need help, the diagnosis goes into the ticket

If the diagnosis is not enough, Open a ticket starts a new ticket already filled in: the server linked, the right topic and a subject. The results are attached automatically, so whoever answers sees straight away what was checked and does not ask you to run the same checks again.

The new ticket with the diagnosis attached

If you prefer, you can remove the attachment with Don't attach it. A diagnosis can be attached to one ticket only, within 24 hours; after that, just run a new one.

FAQ

Which services does it work for? Active VPS and dedicated servers. Dedicated servers have no shared host, so that check shows Unknown.

Can I run it as often as I like? One diagnosis per server every two minutes, up to ten an hour per account. The latest one stays on the card, under View diagnosis.

Does it replace support? No. It saves you time in the simple cases (server powered off, maintenance under way, a firewall blocking ping) and makes our answer faster when you really need our team. Support is still there 24/7.

You will find it on every server's page at cloud.deluxhost.net.