5 Things To Do When Your Site Goes Down

Your site goes down.  Great…there goes another productive day.   Or does it?  Here are 5 things you should be doing instead of refreshing your browser over and over while you scream cuss words at your computer screen.

Call Your Web Hosting Provider

In an ideal world, your web hosting provider will be giving you hourly updates about your site’s status to keep you happy.  In reality, their employees are just as overworked and underpaid as the rest of the world are.  You’ll need to be the one to take the initiative if you want to keep abreast of what’s going on.  Call them and get an estimated time for the problem.  If it doesn’t look like it’s going to be resolved soon, skip to your web hosting Plan B.  You do have a Plan B, don’t you?

Turn Off Your PPC Campaigns ASAP

Log in to your Adwords/Adcenter/Facebook account and turn off all campaigns.  Yep, it’s going to hurt you some (especially with Adwords) but that sounds like a better prospect than paying for clicks that’s just guaranteed to lose you money.

Email Your Customers

If you have regular customers that you know will visit your site, it is prudent to inform them that a problem is present and that someone’s currently working on it.  This could be especially important if you’re running a membership site or are offering a facility for customers to track their orders.  Letting them know beforehand should keep them from complaining later.  If only all web hosts also take this same idea to heart…

Work On Your Site Locally

Hopefully, you have a local mirror of your site.  Instead of losing another productive day, you can always work on the version you have on your network  Write your content, fine-tune your copy or alter your layout, then upload it later when the site does get fixed.

Start Shopping For New Hosting

If your site has been down several times this month and the hosting provider doesn’t look like they’re shaping up soon, it may be a good time to consider shopping for new Windows or Linux hosting.  There are plenty of good, cheap web hosts out there.  You just have to find them.