Guide

Check port 443 publicly

A practical guide to understanding external HTTPS reachability without conflating TCP openness with full TLS or application health.

Port 443 being open only means the TCP socket accepted a connection. It does not prove your certificate, ALPN setup, reverse proxy rules, or upstream app are healthy.

Use TCP results correctly

Use a TCP check when you need to answer the first question: can anything on the public internet connect to this socket at all?

Then follow up with:

  • curl -I https://your-host
  • your load balancer dashboard
  • TLS certificate inspection
  • application-specific health checks