Site Down

Your site’s down, and every refresh still shows nothing.

Five things take a site down, and two you can rule out yourself in three minutes, free, before you call anyone.

The other three need someone who can read an error log. Here’s how to tell which kind you’ve got, and the line where you should stop and hand it over.

Start with the free checks

Text 562-726-2287

Free to try, and the answer is yours. If it isn’t one of these, we tell you what it costs before we touch anything.

3 min

To rule out the easy causes

$0

If the fix is yours to make

~4 hrs

To a written diagnosis if it isn’t

The short answer

A website goes down for five common reasons: the host has an outage, DNS is misconfigured or has just moved, the domain registration expired, a PHP error is stopping the site loading, or the server ran out of disk space.

Two checks are worth doing before you call anyone, and together they take about three minutes.

First, check whether your domain expired. Search for a WHOIS lookup, enter your domain, read the expiry date. An expired domain takes a site down completely and instantly. It’s the one cause nobody thinks of, and you can fix it yourself in ten minutes with a card.

Second, check your host’s status page, then load the site on a different network. Your phone with wifi off is the fastest test. If it loads on mobile data but not on your office wifi, your site is fine and your local DNS is the problem.

If the domain is current and the host says the server is healthy, the fault is in the site itself. That’s where we come in: text 562-726-2287 or describe it here and you’ll have a written diagnosis and a fixed quote in about 4 business hours. Free.

Is this you?

Check you’re on the right page.

If two or more of these are true, keep reading. If none of them are, the emergency hub will route you better.

It’s still down right now, you’re losing sales, and you don’t know why
You get an error code where your site should be, usually 500, 502 or 503
The browser just says the site can’t be reached
It works for you, but a customer says it’s down, or the other way round
It went down on its own, and you swear nobody touched anything
Your host says everything’s fine on their end, which doesn’t help you at all

What’s actually causing it

Five causes, in the order they usually turn out to be.

01 Most common

A host outage or a server problem

The most common cause and the least in your control. Their status page will usually say so, though not always straight away.

DNS

Either something changed recently, a nameserver move or a new record, or a cached entry somewhere is pointing at the wrong place. DNS changes take hours to settle, and during that window your site is up for some people and down for others. That symptom is almost always DNS.

An expired domain

No warning, usually, because the renewal reminder went to an email address nobody checks any more. The site vanishes completely and instantly.

A PHP fatal error

A plugin, a theme update, or your host changing PHP versions. The site was fine, nothing visible happened, and now it’s a blank page or a 500. If you’ve heard the phrase “white screen of death,” this is it.

05 Rare

A full disk

Rare, and unmistakable once you know it. The site half-loads, uploads fail, the database throws errors. It’s almost always backups that nobody pruned.

What you can try yourself

Do these before you pay anyone.

Two of the five causes above are yours to fix in minutes. There’s no catch here and no gate. If one of these gets your site back, you’re done and you owe us nothing.

Check the domain expiry

A WHOIS lookup on your domain shows it. If it lapsed, renew it. That’s the whole fix, and you don’t need us.

Check the host’s status page, then try another network

Phone with wifi off is the fastest test there is. Loads on mobile data but not on your wifi means DNS, and your site is actually fine.

If your host has one-click restore, and it broke today

That’s often the fastest route back. Take a copy of the current state first if the panel offers one.

When to stop

Stop here

If your host confirms the server is healthy and the site is still down, stop. At that point it’s the site, not the infrastructure, and the next steps involve error logs, file permissions and database state. That’s where a wrong move turns a two-hour recovery into a two-day one.

The other stop line: if you’ve already tried more than one fix and none of them worked, stop. A half-finished repair is usually more work than the original fault, because now there are two problems and one of them is undocumented.

What we do about it

Somebody opens your site and finds the actual cause.