What to do if your site crashes

  1. Confirm that your site has gone down. Verify that your site is actually down. Make sure the problem isn’t your browser or internet connection. To be doubly sure, phone a friend and have them test your site.
  2. Try to determine the cause. If you can, try to pinpoint why the downtime is occurring. Programming error? DNS problem? Expired domain? Hardware related?
  3. Contact your hosting company or IT support. Get on the horn with your hosting company and see if they can assist you with your outage. Contact your IT support team or that super-nerdy neighbor of yours.
  4. Notify users of the outage. Don’t leave your users in the dark. Put out a message on your social media accounts to let users know what’s going on and when you plan to have things up and running. If the outage is planned, send out an email beforehand letting users know the date and duration of the outage.
  5. Regularly check in with your IT team. Regular communication with your IT team is crucial. Cooperate with them if they need any help finding information about your website or server. Get an estimate from them as to how long it will take for the problem to be resolved.
  6. Stay calm. Chill out! It’s not the end of the world. Downtime affects the best of us. Staying calm will go a long way in making sure that you and your team can resolve the problem as quickly as possible.