I’ve got a client that seems to regularly contact me to tell me his website isn’t working. He’s based in Italy and I’m in New Zealand, and the website is also hosted in New Zealand. Any time he can’t see his website he blames the hosting and never considers that the problem may be with his ISP or somewhere inbetween.
Invariably when I go to look at his site it works fine for me and I therefore don’t really know how to troubleshoot the problem.
My problem is that I only have one connection to the internet, and so I can’t really see what other people from around the world see.
I know there are websites around that tell you if a site is up or down, but what I really need is a site that shows me what a visitor would see. If I could see his website from a couple of different countries then I’d have a much better idea of where the problem was likely to be (i.e. it could be that there is an international connectivity problem within New Zealand that I can’t see because I’m within the country and it’s therefore local traffic).
Does anyone know of any websites that offer a service like this? Or any other suggestions to track down where the problem is?