But that is not an elegant solution especially if the information on the website need to be accessed urgently. Several third party tools are available to troubleshoot connectivity issues. Some noteworthy ones are ping or traceroute that can provide the user with information why a website cannot be accessed.

There are also tools that can provide access to a website’s contents even if the site is not available. These caching solutions are offered by most search engines.

ErrorZilla is an extension for the Firefox web browser that displays troubleshooting and caching solutions on Firefox error pages.

The modified error page displays eight buttons that can be used to troubleshoot the connectivity issue and to display the contents of the website.

• Try Again: Will reload the website. Pressing F5 or the reload button in the toolbar of the browser has the same effect.
• Google Cache: Display the contents of the website if they are stored in Google Cache.
• Coralize: An alternative cache that can be used to display the contents as well.
• Wayback: Usually not as up to date as the other two caching options. Often used to see how a website looked in previous years.
• Ping: Use an online service to ping the website.
• Trace: Use an online service to trace the connection.
• Whois: Display information about the website registrar)
• Proxify: Use a previously configured web proxy to access the page.

All of the tools that are accessible on the modified error page can also be accessed without the tool. The main benefit of the Firefox add-on is the fact that it provides quick access to these tools which speeds up the troubleshooting process.

ErrorZilla is available at the Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

Even if the contents of a website get deleted they are still accessible through caches which means that we will most likely be able to get everything we need. Most major Search Engines use caches and store information of their crawlers in there. The crawlers report the contents of a website to the Search Engine who stores it in its cache.

Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask all offer a cached version of websites in their search results. Clicking on a cached link will display the content that was last reported by the crawler to the search engine.

Ask: (Click on Cached)

Google: (Click on Cached)

Live: (Click on Cached Page)

Yahoo: (Click on Cached)

There is another method that I would like to point you at that could work. The Coral Content Distribution network uses its own cache to display websites that are busy, unresponsive or down. To access this you add .nyud.net to the hostname. For ghacks it would mean that you would open the url www.ghacks.net.nyud.net.

The extension is called Errorzilla, and it replaces your standard error screen with a much more useful one. After getting a 404 for example, you now have 7 options. The first option is the old refresh one, it’s called “Retry this, which reloads the page to see if it suddenly appeared.

Then there are 3 option to view the webpage on other sites, there is “Google Cache which try’s Google’s cache if there is a cached version of the site there. Then you have “Coralize, they have a nice explanation what it exactly is on their website.
And last we have “Wayback, which has a list of saved version of the website, normally you use it to view how webpages were “in the old days” (their oldest copy of ghacks comes from Oct 27, 2005) but it’s also very useful for this purpose.

And then there are the last 3 options, “Ping” which “pings” the site, “Trace” which traces the way from your pc to the website and “Whois” which lists information on the owner of the domain, and these 3 options are done through dnsstuff.com and whois.net
I hope this extension has made your (computer) life a bit easier, or showed you some interesting sites (like Wayback) and you can always leave comments if you have something on your mind.

Update: Please note that the extension has been uploaded to the Mozilla add-on repository in the meantime. Please check out Error Zilla Firefox Extension for a review and link.