Who do you call when your website goes down?

The website is down. A customer has rung to say so, or you have just tried to load it yourself and got an error. The first question is who to ring, and in a surprising number of businesses nobody is sure.

That uncertainty is the real problem, more than the outage. Most websites come back within hours. The ones that stay down for days are the ones where the first day was spent working out whose job it was.

Check it is actually down

Before ringing anyone, two minutes of checking saves a lot of confusion.

• Try it on your phone with Wi-Fi switched off. If it loads on mobile data, the problem is your office connection, not the website.
• Use a “down for everyone or just me” checker. Several free ones exist. Type in your address and it tries from somewhere else.
• Note exactly what you see. “This site cannot be reached”, a security warning, a blank white page, or a page saying the account is suspended. Each points somewhere different, and the exact wording saves whoever you ring a step.
• Check your email for anything recent about renewals, failed payments or account notices. A large share of outages are a card that expired.

The four things that can fail

A website is not one thing that is up or down. It is four layers, and they are often provided by three different companies.

The domain. The address itself. If it lapses, nothing at that address works: not the site, often not the email either. Usually caused by a renewal that failed silently because the card or the contact email was out of date. Who holds the domain decides how quickly this gets fixed.

DNS. The directory that points the address at the server. Problems here usually follow a change: a new email provider, a moved site, someone tidying settings. If the site went down the day after something was changed, start here.

The hosting. The server the site lives on. It can be down, overloaded, or the account can be suspended for an unpaid invoice or for using too much. Hosts usually have a status page, and the error you see often names them.

The site itself. The server is fine and the address points at it correctly, but the site is broken. On WordPress this is very often an update to a plugin or theme that did not agree with something else. You typically see a blank page or a “critical error” message rather than “cannot be reached”.

Who to call, in practice

What you see on the screen is usually enough to tell which layer has failed, and so who to ring.

• “Site cannot be reached”, and email is also down: the domain. Contact whoever the domain is registered with.
• “Account suspended” or a page from the hosting company: the hosting account. Usually billing. Contact the host.
• A security or certificate warning: the hosting, or whoever manages the site. Certificates renew automatically until they do not.
• A blank page, or “there has been a critical error”: the site. Whoever built or maintains it.
• It went down right after a change: whoever made the change.

If one person or company handles all four layers for you, ring them and you are done. If you are not sure whether that is true, that is the thing to find out on a quiet day.

What a support arrangement should actually cover

Many businesses believe they have website support and in fact have hosting support. The host will confirm the server is running and leave the broken site to you, which is fair, because that is what was bought.

Whatever arrangement you have, it is worth knowing four things about it in writing:

• Which layers it covers. Domain, DNS, hosting, the site itself, or some of them.
• How you report a problem and how quickly someone responds.
• Whether updates are included, because updates prevent more outages than anything else and cause a few as well.
• What a restore involves. If the site is broken beyond a quick fix, rolling back to yesterday’s backup should be a routine job, not an investigation.

Three situations, worked through

A solicitor’s site shows “this site cannot be reached”, and email has stopped too. The domain lapsed. The renewal notices went to the web designer who registered it eight years ago. Usually recoverable within a day if the account can be reached, and very slow if it cannot. Afterwards, the domain goes into the business’s name.

A shop’s site shows a white page after an automatic update overnight. The hosting is fine, the domain is fine, and a plugin update broke the site. Whoever maintains it rolls the plugin back or restores the previous night’s backup. A matter of an hour if there is a maintainer and a working backup, and a long day if there is neither.

A café’s site has “account suspended” across it. The hosting invoice went to an old email address and was not paid. Pay it, and the site is back within the hour. Then change the billing contact to an address that does not belong to one person.

Five things worth doing

1. Write down who provides each of the four layers, with the login and the support contact for each. One page. This is the same list worth making for everything else the business runs on.
2. Put every account in the business’s name, with a recovery email that outlives individual staff.
3. Check the card and the billing contact on the domain and hosting. Most outages are admin, not technology.
4. Ask whoever maintains the site how a restore works and how long it takes. Ideally, see one done.
5. Set up a free uptime monitor that emails a shared address when the site stops responding, so you hear before a customer tells you.

Common misconceptions

• “The host looks after the website.” The host looks after the server. The site running on it is a separate job, and usually a separate arrangement.
• “It went down because it is old.” Sites rarely fail from age alone. They fail from an expired account, a change, or an update. Old sites are more likely to break on updates, which is a different and fixable problem.
• “We would need a developer for any of this.” Diagnosing which layer has failed takes no technical skill, only knowing who provides what.
• “It has never gone down, so we are fine.” Most outages are one-off events: a card expiring, a contact leaving. A good track record says nothing about the next renewal.

The honest summary

When a website goes down, the delay is rarely technical. It is the time spent finding out who is responsible and getting into the right account. Both can be fixed in an afternoon, while nothing is broken.

Know who provides the domain, the DNS, the hosting and the site. Make sure the accounts are the business’s and the billing details are current. Have someone who can restore a backup. That covers the large majority of what takes small business websites offline.

If your site is down now, or you would like to know who would be responsible if it were, get in touch with what you know. Even a partial answer to “who provides what” is enough to start from.