How to troubleshoot site is not responding errors in coreFORCE eCommerce

Coreware monitors all of our cloud-hosted servers, and we are normally aware of outages quickly and can resolve them.  If you are unable to access your coreFORCE site, here are a few things to try before submitting a ticket.

1. The first thing to check is to make sure that you are able to access other Internet sites normally. If you are unable to access the Internet at all, the problem is most likely with your ISP or network infrastructure.
    
2. If you are using coreFORCE and do something that consumes a lot of resources (e.g. opening a report that is pulling thousands of records), your browser may stop responding and even if you open a new browser window or go to another page on coreFORCE, you will get no response.  Among the errors you may see are: "503 Service Unavailable", "504 Gateway timed out", the browser window may be stuck at a blank screen, or you may see your site but the spinning circle icon never goes away.
   
   That doesn't necessarily mean that the whole site is down; what happens is that your user session gets locked up until the current process finishes. You can test it by connecting to the site via another browser (or an Incognito/Private Browsing session). If the site responds that way, the problem is your user session. Your user session will typically unfreeze as soon as the current process finishes, but if it seems stuck for an inordinately long time (e.g. more than 10 minutes), you can reset your session by deleting cookies for your site.
   
   How to delete cookies in Google Chrome: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95647
   How to delete cookies in Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/clear-cookies-and-site-data-firefox
   How to delete cookies in Microsoft Edge: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4027947/microsoft-edge-delete-cookies
   How to delete cookies in Safari: https://support.apple.com/guide/safari/manage-cookies-and-website-data-sfri11471/mac
   
   Once you delete cookies, you will be prompted to re-login and receive a new authorization code for that browser session.
    
3. If you are able to access the Internet, but not access coreFORCE, and all users at your location cannot access coreFORCE, check to see if your coreFORCE site can be accessed outside of your internal wifi (e.g. by using a mobile device disconnected from wifi).  If the site is accessible externally but not internally, your public IP address may have been blacklisted.
   
   coreFORCE aggressively blocks the IP addresses of hacking attempts. Sometimes this can cause your IP address to be blocked because of an innocent request that matches the profile of a hacking attempt (for example, trying to access the URL of a commonly hacked WordPress administration page). If you are getting a "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable" error, you may be blacklisted. Please check your public IP address (www.google.com/search?q=my+ip) and submit it in a ticket to Coreware support at https://help.coreware.com.
   
4. Less common scenarios include infrastructure problems.  One possibility would be an internal DNS server that is defining your coreFORCE domain name internally and redirecting traffic away from the cloud-hosted site.  Another possibility is that a firewall rule is blocking access.