When your site goes down
Outages are rare on static hosting, but they are not impossible — and about half the time the site is fine and something else is broken. Here is how to tell, and what we do.
Static hosting fails rarely, but not never. And roughly half the time a site is “down”, the site is fine and something else is broken. Here is how to tell the difference in two minutes, and what we do about it.
Work out what is actually broken
Try another network
Mobile data, or an external checker such as a “is it down” service. If the outside world can reach it, the site is up.
Try a private window
Rules out a stale cache or a bad cached redirect on your machine.
Read the error precisely
“Server not found” is a DNS problem. A certificate warning is an SSL problem. A 500 or 503 means the server was reached and failed. These have completely different causes.
Check whether email still works
Website down and email down at the same time points at DNS or the domain itself — often an expired registration. Website alone points at hosting.
Tell us what you saw
The exact error text, the URL, the time, and whether it fails on mobile data too. That is usually enough for us to skip straight to the cause.
What the errors mean
| Server not found / DNS error | The domain is not resolving. Expired registration, a DNS change, or nameserver trouble. Check email too. |
|---|---|
| This site can’t be reached / timeout | Resolving but not answering. Usually network-side, sometimes local to you. |
| 500 / 502 / 503 | The server answered with a failure. On a dynamic site, an application error; on static hosting, rare and usually brief. |
| 404 on a page that existed | Not an outage — a page was moved or renamed. Fixable in minutes with a redirect. |
| Certificate warning | Renewal failed. The site is running; browsers are blocking it. See SSL certificates and the padlock. |
| Old version of the site | Cache, yours or an intermediate one. A private window tells you which. |
What we do
Sites we host are monitored from outside your network. When something fails we investigate first and report to you with what broke, what we did, and what prevents a recurrence — we would rather you heard it from us than from a patient.
Because every publish is a versioned snapshot, the fastest fix for an outage caused by a change is almost always to roll back to the previous version immediately and diagnose afterwards. Restoring service comes first.
What to tell patients meanwhile
- Answer the phone. The website being down does not stop the practice; make sure reception knows what to say.
- Post on your Google Business Profile. It is independent of your site and is where people look next — see Google Business Profile.
- Do not promise a time you have not been given.
- If booking runs through the site, say clearly how to book by phone instead.
FAQ
How would we know before a patient tells us?
External monitoring on the sites we host. If you would like alerts to reach you directly as well as us, we can add your address — some practices want that and others find it noisy.
Our site is slow but not down.
Still worth reporting. Slowness usually traces to something specific — a heavy embedded widget, a large unoptimised image, a third-party script — and is generally fixable once identified.
Only one staff member cannot reach it.
Then it is that machine or that network: a stale DNS cache, security software, or a browser extension. Try a private window and a different network on that device before treating it as a site problem.