When your website is down, it’s always a surprise. What’s worse, downtime can be expensive in terms of lost productivity, lost revenue, cost to recover, and cost of reputation. Some companies measure the time lost per second when a site goes down because they have so much traffic. However, there are a few things you can do to get past the panic and into solutions to get your site back online.
Start Here When Your Website is Down
Check Another Website that You Know is Working
Visit something like CNN.com or Google.com and see if that is working. That will assure you that your network is still connected to the internet. If it says “No connection,” then you have a network problem. If it says “This site can’t be reached,” (Google Chrome) or “Hmm, we can’t reach this page,” (Microsoft Edge) then your internet is still working in some way. (The other benefit to checking a site like CNN.com or NYTimes.com is that you can check the headlines to see if there is a global DDOS attack happening.)
Check Your Website on Another Network
Whether you text a friend or just pull out your phone, checking the site using a different network. This is as easy as using your phone without connecting to your office Wi-Fi. Turn off the Wi-Fi on your phone so that you are using your data plan to connect to the internet. This will let you know if there is something wrong with your office network. Your office network can be configured to work on some sites and not on others, so getting off the network will give you a clear picture of whether or not your site is working.
Check it With a Third Party Tool
Visiting a site like ViewDNSinfo and filling in your domain name can tell you if your site is up and running or not. The IP addresses or the error messages it shows are important information that will help you in the next step.
Call Tech Support When Your Site is Down
If you are a Lieberman Technologies website hosting customer, call 1-812-434-6600 and tell us. Because we monitor our customer sites, there is a good chance we probably already know your website is down and are working toward getting it back up. If you aren’t our customer, then call your IT Department, web hosting provider, or your web designer. Tell them you did the things on this list and that will save them some trouble. If you’re using a cheap web host, however, you should be prepared to wait for customer service. Of course, you can always become our customer…
For More Information and Preparation
There are a lot of things you can do to make sure your website doesn’t go down. Having a good web host with redundancy is one way. Having nightly backups to restore your site is also good. We use monitors like UptimeRobot or Jetpack to keep watch on the websites we host. These alert us when a website goes down and often give an error message so we know the reason.
All websites are subject to failure. Minimizing the impact of an outage or a software error and getting back online is the key. If you want to learn more about our Web Hosting Services, contact us.