BQM: No Data for self hosted website but public IP is fine?

I have a website with a URL that's accessible through HTTPS, if I go to a website which lets you ping a site to see if it is up and I ping my subdomain.domainame.tld, I get all responses back and it shows me my IP address as well

When I create a BQM for my public IP, it's fine, it works, it's all good and I'm golden

However if I add the previously mentioned subdomain.domainname.tld into the BQM, or if I do HTTPS://, or if I do domainname.tld, etc I just get Monitor Status Active No Data

It would be nice to have this work because there's a small group of people who use this site and because my internet is going down for a minute every 30 minutes just now, it'd be a useful resource for them to have so they know if my internet has gone, or if the server went kablooey

Hosted services are often [usually? always?] on a shared IP address for IPv4 at least.

So, typically, the server running the IP address will be happy to respond to pings, but the server process running your website probably has no idea what a ping is.

Are you doing this on your home broadband or in a hosting centre?

If your home broadband, then are you doing "port forwarding" for TCP/443 to the server that hosts the web content? That would mean your router is doing the ICMP ECHO response (ping) to the BQM; and perhaps the router is getting fed up responding. Many will assume this many pings is malicious and start ignoring.

If you are doing this in a hosting centre then perhaps look at the firewall configuration of the box.

The web server is a physical box on my local network connected to the internet via home broadband.

443 is one of the ports that are forwarded to the server, users are able to access the web URL externally, dynamic DNS is configured as well for the domain so when my IP changes, all that gets handled quick smart automatically.

For whatever reason though, the BQM just doesn't want to see it

If I ping the domain it works, but BQM doesn't

Not sure if this explanation helps.... basicaly it says ping doesn't operate at the port level, just on the IP address:
can-you-ping-a-specific-port-of-a-machine

So I expect the ping is either just going the the IP address of your router (which is responding) or failing because it can't resolve the subdomain to an IP and port.

In reply to a post by Sandwich247:

The web server is a physical box on my local network connected to the internet via home broadband.

Thanks for the detail.

If I ping the domain it works, but BQM doesn't

As you are hosting at home, unless you have an advanced ISP (e.g. Andrews & Arnold) that supply multiple IP addresses, most people have only one IPv4. This is normally assigned to the router. Your dynamic DNS name is then assocated with this IP, and when the IP changes, the DNS name is updated. I've been doing that for years.

The BQM is trying to send over 100 pings a minute to the IP or name you configure. Some Dynamic DNS names don't work with the BQM, I had issues with the free service with my ASUS router until I switched to a different provider.

The BQM has zero clue you are doing web, or HTTP/HTTPS, on the connection as only your router can respond to ICMP ECHO (ping) packets.

Unless you have configured DMZ mode on your router, the router itself may be ignoring the sheer volume of PINGs from Thinkbroadband. Some routers you can set up a trusted list of IPs; or switch off any "flood protection" features.

In reply to a post by Bam16:

Not sure if this explanation helps.... basicaly it says ping doesn't operate at the port level, just on the IP address:

Correct. PING is a command line tool that sends ICMP packets of type ECHO. There are many low level protocols in TCP/IP and of these ICMP, TCP and UDP are the ones that home users come across.

TCP is where the HTTP/HTTPS connection works, and it uses ports to choose an application (25 for email, 80 for web, 443 for secure web etc). UDP is typically used for DNS (can use TCP as well) also using ports, DNS is 53.

ICMP is for control and diagnostic messages, ECHO is most common. No ports used, just IP address to IP address.

When pinging the subdomain.domainname.tls I get back my IP address in the square brackets so I've only got the one IP address, yeah.

If it helps, the other users of the site are running continuous pings to the subdomain.domainname.tls from their own computers and are getting back a constant steady stream of replies without any issue

I asked them to try it while setting this up just to make sure I wasn't doing anything wrong but they aren't getting any issues.

I had my partner who is in the US just now do a:

ping subdomain.domainname.tld -n 200 -l 1000

and they received back 200 with 0% loss, ping minimum was 12, max was 514, average was 193.

It works fine without defining the byte length as well.

The dynamic DNS address updating is done through a cron job on the server itself as opposed to the router or anything else, I don't get why the BQM is having all these issues but no-one else is, I'm sort of lost when it comes to troubleshooting it.

In reply to a post by Sandwich247:

The dynamic DNS address updating is done through a cron job on the server itself as opposed to the router or anything else, I don't get why the BQM is having all these issues but no-one else is, I'm sort of lost when it comes to troubleshooting it.

Might be worth droping [email protected] an email with your IP address in asking if the team can investigate.

It is possible your IPv4 range has been transferred from another ISP elsewhere in the world and there could have been a block on it... only team@ will know.

You could try F8lure in the interim, much smaller voluntary organisation, but doing a similar thing
https://f8lure.mouselike.org/auth.asp

Edited by jchamier (Sun 27-Jul-25 17:36:31)

Setting a monitor up on that other site looks to be working without issue, so it's good that there's a workaround there.

Thinking about it, there is still a live monitor for my IP address just on its own as it is, so maybe having two monitors pointing to the same IP destination is what's causing the issue - I've disabled the IP address monitor and will keep it disabled for 24 hours to see if that does anything, if it doesn't I'll give the team a quick email see if they've got any suggestions.

Thanks for your help with this!