You open your page and it does not load. Or it loads with a red warning saying the site is not secure. The first thing worth knowing when your website is down is that the cause is rarely the one people assume: most outages are an expired date, a full server or an update that ran by itself overnight. Attacks happen, but they are the minority.
First: is it down for everyone or only for you?
It sounds obvious and it saves half the phone calls. Sometimes the site is perfectly fine and what is failing is your connection, your browser or an address your computer has cached wrongly.
The two-minute check
- Open it on your phone using mobile data, not wifi. If it works there, the problem is your network.
- Try a private window. That rules out the cache and any extensions.
- Ask someone in another town to open it. One message and you know.
- Write down the exact error. "Server not found" is not the same as "error 500"; that sentence is half the diagnosis.
The five causes behind almost every outage
After a few years fixing these things the split is always similar: the domain, the certificate, the hosting, an update and, last of all, an attack. In that order of likelihood.
Cause 1: the domain has expired
The most common and the silliest. The domain renews once a year and the reminder goes to an inbox nobody opens. When it lapses, the website and the email stop working at the same time, and that is precisely the clue: if email has stopped coming in too, check the domain before anything else.
The good news is that a domain does not vanish the same day. ICANN sets out the life cycle of a domain name: after the expiry date there is a window to renew it and then a redemption period, with a fee on top, before it is released. The sooner you spot it, the cheaper it is.
Why it is nearly always the card
Auto-renewal was switched on, but the card expired, or the bank changed, and the payment failed. Nobody read the warning because it went to the address of whoever built the site six years ago. Who should be receiving that email is covered in who owns your domain, and it prevents more trouble than almost anything else.
Cause 2: the security certificate has expired
Here the site does not disappear: the browser throws a full-screen warning saying the connection is not private, and the visitor leaves. It happens because the certificate has an expiry date and the automatic renewal broke at some point.
The most widely used free certificates, from Let's Encrypt, last ninety days, and the organisation itself recommends renewing them every sixty. They renew themselves if somebody set that renewal up properly; when it fails, the warning appears overnight without anyone having touched a thing.
Cause 3: the hosting is full or down
Two different scenarios. If the server has run out of space — stacked backups, an overflowing mailbox, error logs growing on their own — the site starts throwing odd errors before it falls over completely. If it is the provider having an incident, everything goes at once and there is usually a notice in their panel.
The sign that the disk is filling up
Forms stop sending, new images will not upload and the admin panel drags, all in the same week. That trio is nearly always a space problem, and it is solved by clearing old backups and logs before the server gives up entirely.
Which kind of hosting suits what you have is in what hosting does your website need. And if the site had been dragging for weeks, the outage is no surprise: we cover that in why your website is slow on mobile.
Cause 4: an update broke something
Very typical of sites running a content manager. A component updates overnight, clashes with another and the page goes blank or throws a 500. Nobody is watching at that hour, so the business finds out when it opens.
That is why updates should not all run automatically without a backup first. The difference between twenty minutes and two days is having yesterday backup, and that belongs in website maintenance.
One detail that helps you recognise it: if the site went down between two and six in the morning and nobody had published anything the day before, start there before any other theory.
Cause 5: somebody got in
The least frequent of the five, even though it is the first thing everyone thinks of. The signs are different: redirects to strange pages, browser warnings, content nobody added. What to do then, with its deadlines and its data-protection side, is in why small business websites get hacked.
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What not to do in the first hour
- Poking at the DNS "just in case". A bad change takes hours to undo.
- Updating everything at once when something is already broken.
- Deleting files from the server without knowing what they are.
- Switching provider in the middle of it. First you get the site back up; moving is a separate conversation with its own order, as we explain in changing web agency.
Who to call, and in what order
It depends on the symptom, which is why writing down the error matters. If neither the site nor the email works, start with whoever handles the domain. If email works but the site does not, start with the hosting. If it is the security warning, start with whoever maintains the site.
The five details worth having to hand
Who the domain registrar is, who the hosting provider is, what the site is built with, who maintains it and where the latest backup lives. If that list does not exist, the outage lasts twice as long, and not because of the fault: because of the hours spent working out who to call.
The holding page almost nobody has
While it is being fixed, what the customer sees is a browser error. With a simple holding page — "we are having a technical issue, call us on …" — the visitor does not leave thinking the business has closed down. You prepare it once and leave it ready.
And the email, does that still work?
It depends where it lives. If email runs through the same place as the website, it goes down with it; if it is separate, it holds. That is one of the reasons we recommend keeping them apart, and it is covered in business email with your own domain.
What Google does while your site is down
Nothing dramatic if it is brief. Google explains it in its documentation on how HTTP status codes affect its crawlers: faced with server errors it reduces how often it comes by and, if the error persists over time, it eventually drops those URLs from the index. A few hours go unnoticed; a week does not.
When it comes back, check the indexing report to make sure everything is in there again: how to do that is in what to check in Google Search Console.
How long it takes to come back
With the diagnosis done, most of it is sorted the same morning. Renewing a domain and having it work again can take a few hours. A certificate, minutes. A broken update, however long the backup takes to restore. A domain in its redemption period is the only case that runs into days, and into money.
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How half of these outages get prevented
None of the five causes is unforeseeable. They all give warning beforehand, it is just that the warning arrives somewhere nobody looks.
The four dates that cannot slip by
- The domain renewal, with an up-to-date card.
- The certificate renewal, actually verified rather than just switched on.
- The hosting invoice.
- The monthly check of backups and updates.
Four dates a year and one review a month. That is it. None of the four costs money to watch; what costs money is the day one of them slips by unnoticed.
What we do when it happens
The first step is checking whether the site answers from outside and with what error, because that already points the way. Then domain, certificate, server and backup, in that order. Meanwhile we put up the holding page so anyone landing knows you are still there. And once it is back, we look at why it happened, not just at whether it works again.
What it costs to have this covered
In our prices, Tu Landing is 100 € a month and Tu Web 200 € a month, plus VAT and with no lock-in, and that already includes the domain, the hosting, the email and the maintenance, with the domain in the client name. The four dates above stop being your problem, which is half the value of having someone run this.
If you also want articles, a Google listing and campaigns, the presence plans are 400, 750 and 1,500 € a month.
From Sant Antoni de Calonge, with clients in Girona and Barcelona
If your site is down right now and you do not know where to start, send us the address and the exact error on screen and we will tell you where the problem sits. And if it is not ours, we will tell you who to call.
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