Why "no response" doesn't mean "host is down"

ICMP echo (what ping actually sends) is frequently and deliberately blocked by firewalls, security groups, and hosting providers as a standard hardening measure — rate-limiting or dropping ICMP is a common, unremarkable default that has nothing to do with whether the actual services on that host (web server, API, mail server) are up and reachable. A host that never responds to ping can be serving HTTPS traffic normally the entire time; ping simply measures ICMP reachability specifically, not general host or service availability. Treating a ping timeout as proof of an outage is a common but incorrect inference — checking the actual service (with the Port Checker or HTTP Header Inspector tool, for instance) is the way to confirm whether something is really down.

Why this measures the server's path, not yours

These pings originate from this site's own server and travel that server's network path to the target — a different physical route, through different networks and peering points, than a ping from your own machine would take. That matters for interpreting results: a target that's unreachable or slow from this server's network location might be perfectly fine from yours, and vice versa, since network reachability and latency are inherently path-dependent, not a universal property of the target. This tool's disclosure of running server-side (rather than from your browser, which ICMP fundamentally can't do from a web page anyway) is exactly why that distinction is called out explicitly.