Will your clients be able to reach your web site from no matter which location or are some routes unavailable?
Your web site might be available on the local network, but can it be found from the outside world?
There are several free services on the Internet which allow you to test the routes to your site from various locations around the world. This will show if your Internet hosting provider or your network has a fully working Internet connection and if there are any problems with your domain name server (DNS).
To check the routes, you can use the many free traceroute gateways on the Internet. A good start to find those gateways is Traceroute.org [1].
Other networking tools are available on DNSStuff.com [2]. I’ve paid for the membership on that service as it can also alert me when there are some problems with my DNS. The site provides an excellent collection of tools to verify the technical working of your site or to analyze malicious traffic and IP addresses.
You could also use proxy servers or relays around the world. However these are harder to find and usually closed from outside access. AnonyMouse [3] is a free service which lets you browse other sites using a different network. On the AnonyMouse web site you enter the address of your site. That server will then connect to your web server, fetch the page with all its contents and serve it to you.
For large e-commerce sites, it’s a good idea to hire an outside service which constantly monitors your web site from various networks and notifies you when your site goes down. Services like Keynote [4] and InternetSeer [5] are quite popular.
Other services and programs can be found in the site management directory of Internet Product Watch [6].