Dead domain, dead page, or just slow? How to check a website properly

We look at a lot of businesses whose website has quietly stopped working. Often nobody inside the company knows. The site was built years ago by someone who has moved on, and the first sign of trouble is customers saying they could not find you.

There are four different ways a website can be broken, and they need different fixes. Opening it in a browser tells you almost nothing about which one you have.

1. The domain does not exist

$ nslookup example.co.in
** server can't find example.co.in: NXDOMAIN

NXDOMAIN means the domain name resolves to nothing at all. Usually it expired and was never renewed. This is the worst case and the most urgent: an expired domain can be registered by anyone, including someone who will happily point your company name at whatever they like.

2. The domain resolves but nothing answers

$ curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}' --max-time 10 https://example.co.in
000

DNS works, but the connection times out. The domain is still yours — the hosting is gone or the server is down. Cheaper to fix than case 1, and your name is not at risk.

3. The server answers with an error

A 404 means the server is alive and telling you that specific page is missing. A 500 means it is alive and broken. Both mean your hosting is fine and the problem is inside the site — often a page that quietly disappeared in a redesign while links to it stayed live.

4. It answers, but search engines are told to ignore it

$ curl -sI https://example.co.in | grep -i x-robots-tag
x-robots-tag: noindex

This is the cruellest one. The site loads perfectly for you and is invisible on Google. It usually happens when a staging site goes live without the `noindex` being removed. A business can spend a year wondering why nobody finds them.

Also worth checking on any site that has never appeared in search: whether robots.txt and sitemap.xml exist at all. If both return your 404 page, search engines were never given a map of the site.

Why this matters commercially

A company with a dead website is not necessarily a company in trouble. Frequently it is a healthy business whose web presence rotted while everyone was busy. The listing on a directory still points at a domain that vanished two years ago.

If that is you, run the four checks above before you commission anything. Knowing which of the four you have is the difference between a domain renewal and a rebuild.