5 Things To Do When Your Website is Down
As most of you lovely followers noticed 2weeks ago, my blog crashed and it took me a week before I could get it back up.
If I had known what the problem was, I should have had my site back up within 48hours but I was clueless.
I actually thought it was a malfunction from my web browser so I tried loading up my website with Google Chrome, Safari and Mozilla Firefox.
I almost tried Opera too but I got the message after the third try. 🙁
Self-hosting your blog is not easy. Phew! but I’m glad I am learning quickly.
So just incase you are facing the same problem, below are a couple of things to do that can help you.
- Don’t Panic – It’s pretty easy to go into panic mode when you have no clue what’s going on with your blog. You may start thinking, ‘what’s going to happen to all my posts?’, ‘all my pictures’,’all my work!!’ Sigh, you get my point. Don’t do that and don’t worry, as long as you’ve got back up, you’re fine. You just need to be calm and clear headed and go on to step number two.
- Find out the reason – There is always a reason. Websites don’t just crash (I hope), something triggered it. So whatever error message it gives you when you try to load your blog, read and re-read it to make sense of it. Mine read, “Domain mapping error etc…” but it did not make sense to me at first glance because I couldn’t just understand why my website wasn’t up. If I were calm, I would have figured out earlier that my domain ‘igbocurls.com’ was not directing to my web-host. Which basically means, my url was not connected to its page. I know, its a long story. Anyway, I didn’t know that so the first thing I did was,
- Contact Web-Hosting Company – I host my blog with Hostgator and their team are just plain awesome. Whenever I have a problem I simply need to give them a chat and they fix it quickly. Calling is also an option but I’ve never tried that so I can’t give my opinion on it. Through Hostgator live chat I was made aware that, my domain name was not mapped to Hostgator but rather with WordPress. I still didn’t understand what domain mapping was then but at least I had made progress.
- Once you have an understanding of what triggered your website to crash, you can find a solution quicker– As I’ve said previously, the best method for me to contact web hosts is through live chat because I live abroad and it’s just simply more affordable and quicker for me to get a response. It was quite difficult to find WordPress live chat since every link redirected me to their Support forum but I eventually got through and you can find it here. ‘ https://wordpress.com/help/contact‘ This link will only work if you have a WordPress blog and if you are also logged in.
- Be patient– After you have contacted the correct hosts that can solve your problem, be patient. In my case, I had not paid for my domain name renewal so it got cancelled! Oops… Pay your bills people! If its not a payment issue, then the Happiness Engineers are always eager to help.
On a final note, as long as you have back ups, it can all be fixed back to the way it was, (just like mine!).
I hope this helps someone!
Let me know if you’ve experienced something similar and how you handled it in the comment section below.
If you would also like me to write more about my experiences with Self-hosting my blog chime in below!
Until my next post, lots of love & Blessings! 🙂
Chinwe Juliet
