What Happens When Your Website Goes Down

Every website goes down at some point. Servers fail, certificates expire, providers have bad days. The question is never whether it happens. The question is how long it lasts and who notices first.

The worst version is the one where a customer tells you. By then it has usually been hours, sometimes days, and you have no idea how many people tried to reach you and gave up.

The fix starts with monitoring, and it is cheap. A service that checks your site every few minutes from several countries and messages you when it stops responding costs very little, and it means you find out before your customers do.

Know where your things live. Write down who your domain registrar is, who hosts the site, where the DNS is managed and who holds each account. Businesses lose days to outages not because the problem was hard, but because nobody could remember which of three former contractors controlled the domain.

Set your certificates and your domain to renew automatically, then set a calendar reminder anyway. An expired certificate makes browsers show a full page security warning, which does far more damage than being slow. An expired domain can be bought by somebody else.

Keep backups you have actually restored. An untested backup is a belief, not a plan. Restore one to a test address once a year and confirm it still works, because the moment you need it is the worst possible moment to discover that it does not.

Decide in advance what you will tell people. A short honest message on a social account saying the site is down and we are fixing it costs nothing and keeps trust. Silence reads as either incompetence or closure.

None of this prevents failure. It converts failure from a crisis into a short interruption, and that difference is worth far more than the small cost of arranging it.