What To Do If Your Website Crashes
All websites end up crashing at some time or another. It’s something that paranois most website owners and it ends up happening at the worst moment possible. With that said, you cant change the past, instead, look towards the future and try and find solutions and fix problems that you may have come across during your experience. Make sure that you’re always prepared for the worst case scenario and that you can get back up on your feet in a timely manner. Today I’ve developed a list of things that you should do to “ease the pain” and how you can simplify your experience of having your website crash. The tips I’m going to talk about include:
- What your initial instinct should be.
- Who you should contact.
- How you should react.
- What you can learn from the experience.
At the end of this article I’m going to open this topic up for discussion. It’s important to know that there are multiple reasons for a website crash and countless other reasons of how these crashes can be resolved. With that said, let’s continue with the first point. We feature a large community at bradwelltv.com, so there should be plenty of input at the end of this article.
What Should Your Immediate Reaction Be?
The first thing you need to do before making any decisions on what you’re going to do next is take a deep breath. Walk away for a minute and position your mind away from the problem. This is a critical step because it opens your mind and lets you appreciate what’s just happened. Additionally, it’s also a good idea to make sure that you know what type of server crash has just happened. There are many reasons for a crash to happen and we’ll dig deeper into that later in the post. But first you need to clear your mind.
People you should contact and finding information about the crash.
The first thing you should do before contacting a representative of your hosting company is to check to make sure that this wasn’t planned downtime. This means checking your email, monitoring the hosting company’s blog, and checking with other costumers that you may know of. Quite a lot of time people may possibly be experiencing a similar crash and the hosting company is already aware of the situation.
If you’re problem is unique contact the company directly. Most providers will display their phone number on a contact page or at the footer of their home page. Typically this number will be an 800 number, however, if you’re using a local company there may be other means of telecommunication that you’ll have to use.
If the above information doesn’t help or you’ve failed to reach a costumer service representative who’s aware of the situation try and email the company. In fact, I’d recommend contacting someone who’s high up in the management list because they’re the ones who’re going to make sure the problem is resolved. Company emails are usually found in directories throughout the Internet or can sometimes be found directly on the companies home page.
Things you can do and how you should react.
We’ve already discussed what your first reaction should be. Now it’s time to review what you can do on your end to make sure the problem is resolved quickly and efficiently.
Firstly, you need to figure out the problem at hand. If you’re running your own server or the hosting company you’re using isn’t responding you need to find the problem yourself. If you’re familiar with servers that’s great, but for those of you who’re less server-savy try your best to contact someone who does know this stuff. Time is of concern here so make your best effort to get an expert quick.
Another thing you should do is give your visitors something to look at. This can be done by forwarding your domain to another website you own. You can also try to get some sort of text up warning your users about the issues you’re having at the moment. The worst thing that you could do is not inform your visitors and allow them to think that you’ve suddenly disappeared.
Things that should be learned from this experience.
There are a few things that will help you and your reputation throughout the experience of having your server crash. Firstly, you need to make sure that if the fault is yours for the crash that you ensure it won’t happen again. Fix security problems, fill patches, and make your website users aware of the problem so that they can warn you if something similar happens again.
You should also be firm with your hosting company. Make sure that they can guarantee you that this problem will not happen again. If they can’t fix the problems or they refuse to, switch to a new company. You don’t have to deal with this, move onward and choose a more honest and forthright company. Now days there should be no excuse for a company not to guarantee you a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
One important thing that you should do is make sure that you always have an up-to-date back up of your website. If your website goes down and you lose all of your data there’s no telling as to whether you’ll be able to retrieve it. Backup at least once a week in different places so that you can guarantee yourself that you’ll be able to keep your website data even if the site goes down.
Conclusion
Fixing a website crash is by no means an easy task. It’s typically an extremely stressful situation to have to deal with things like this. Just make sure that in the event that this does happen that you do have back ups available so that the problem won’t turn into a catastrophe.
With all of that said let’s open this topic up for discussion. What tips do you have in the event that a website crashes? What methods do you use to ensure that these types of problems don’t happen? Feel free to leave your thoughts and opinions as a comment below or send me a reply on Twitter (@bradwell).
