What to do When Your Website Crashes

It’s every website owner’s nightmare: you go to visit your own site, and it’s not there. Or worse: a customer calls to complain and you’ve been hacked. But what should you do next? As web development experts, BoxChilli have the answers.

If your Site is Completely Missing

1. Try it from your mobile

Before you panic, check that it’s not just your connection that’s gone down. Check that other sites work, and if they do, phone a friend or look up your site on your phone.

2. Call your hosting provider

If your site has completely vanished, it’s likely to be a problem with your hosting. If you’re lucky, you’ll find out that your site has been unexpectedly successful this month and you’ve run out your bandwidth allowance (like using up your phone credit) and a top up payment will get it going again. If you’re unlucky, you may have been subject to a ‘denial of service’ attack. Your hosting provider may have options for you. Otherwise, it may be a technical problem at the hosting company’s end.

If your Site has been Replaced by Another Page

1. Check what the page says

A forgotten bill can take down a website. If the page is from your hosting company or domain registry service, call them. If the replacement text is malicious or the site just looks broken, call your web development team.

2. Call your web development team or system admin

In most cases, human error is to blame and your web team will be able to figure out what’s gone wrong and repair it quickly. If a cyber attack has occurred, then they may have to roll the site back to an earlier iteration, so you may lose some data.

3. I am my web development team

Typically, sites go wrong when the code is changed or updated. Professional web developers know this, and use special test environments to check that an update will work. However, if you’re running your own site you may not have this luxury. If you’ve added a new module or app, changed a setting or updated some software, switch back to what you had before. If you can’t, restore your most recent back up. You do have back-ups, right?

None of that Helped!

1. Change your web development team

A good web development team can provide ongoing support and maintain back ups of your site. This means that they can restore it if something goes wrong, for example if you get hacked. Support packages like the ones we provide can include paying service bills, ensuring that your site never goes down because a letter didn’t arrive.

At BoxChilli, we’re proud of what we do, and we strive for excellence. We have an uptime for the websites we manage that’s over 99%, so if your site has crashed and you’re not happy with how your web team have responded – or you don’t have a web team to do the panicking for you – give us a call.

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