Not Able To Access Website

A friend of mine asked for some help – she couldn’t access this one website from her house desktop PC. All other websites worked fine except for this one.

Website: www.4yourtype.com

First I checked the TCP/IPv4 Settings.

Step: In Windows 7 go to ‘Control Panel’ > ‘Network and Internet’ > ‘Network and Sharing Center’ > ‘Change adapter settings’ > Right click on the active connection and click ‘Properties’ > click ‘Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) and click ‘Properties’.

So I did a ping test and the results showed that it wasn’t able to connect to the website.

Step: To run ping, on the Windows search bar type ‘cmd’ and press enter. When the console appears type ‘ping www.4yourtype.com’ or whatever the web address you want to test.

Second I tried the use the Google Public DNS. For more info, see this link:- https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/

But I still received the same the ‘Request timed out’ message above.

Then I decided to use the mobile hotspot function on my Blackberry Q10 to connect the internet from the desktop. And it worked – I was able to access the website.

We concluded that my friends internet service provider (ISP) blocked the website on their end, since I had no problems accessing the webpage from my phone (I was using a different ISP). We logged a ticket with her ISP and true enough it was a filtering on their end.

You could try these steps to check when your are having problems accessing a website.

One other thing – when I used my mobile hotspot to connect to the internet and did the ping test, it still showed ‘Request timed out’ even though I could access the website. Searching the web, I found out that some websites don’t allow ping test for security reasons. Hence, a ping test might not be conclusive in determining if a website is accessible or otherwise.