What To Do NEXT Time Your Blog Goes Down – And It Will!

As you might have noticed, our .Me blog was down for a bit the other day because of certain server issues that are the 1% of all those 99% uptime guarantees you get when you order a hosting service! While you can’t avoid downtime, it’s important to understand what do to when it happens – and how to react. Here’re our top tips to getting your blog up in no time at all!

1. You: It Might Be Down Just For You

Don’t panic just yet. There may be an entirely normal, yet kinda weird reason that you can’t access your blog – and that’s because you’re offline instead of it. A bad connection or issues with your ISP can not just cut you off the Internet at large, but also just from certain websites, in this case: Your blog. A more nefarious reason can be that your government has blocked the website! Thankfully, you can use a simple tool like ISUP.Me that ask the simple question of “Is *your blog* down for everyone of just me?*. After entering the URL of your blog, ISUP.Me will quickly give you the answer!

2. Downtime: It’s Not You, But It Might Be Your Server

If the website is down for everyone including your grandmother on the other side of the country, you need to check what the problem is. The first place to check it the company hosting your website. If it just doesn’t show up at all, something might be wrong with the server your website is on.

While most will give you a 99.9% uptime guarantee, they leave out the 0.1% for a reason – which you are experiencing at the moment that you need to check with them what’s wrong with your website. Using their ticketing system or email, ask the simple question of what is going on with your website and is it down because of downtime with its hosting. A good hosting company will reply in no time, so if it doesn’t feel free to call them up and ask what’s going on. Every website goes down for a bit, so the quality of your hosting company is actually how they deal with a problem they know they’ll face!

3. Backend: Bugs, Issues and Something Happened?

Fiddling with your blog’s settings, installing insecure plugins or just a simple bug can bring your website down. It happens. It’s normal and if you have a development team that can get on the job and fix your website quickly, that’s great! Most blogger, however, won’t have someone that can help fix these bugs on call. Your hosting company might be able to suggest a solution, but it can in no way fix more serious issues under the hood of your CMS.

What do you? Thankfully, numerous web services offer system administrators and developers at an hourly rate, so you can get someone on your task quite quickly. A great service to use if you use the world’s most popular blogging content management system, WordPress, is Codeable! From installing plugin’s you’re not sure about to fixing your website, Codeable offers WordPress experts at a reasonable price. Until today, Codeable experts have finished over 27,432 projects for customers with 98,9% of them rating the job with 5 out of 5 stars. The great thing about a service like Codeable in this situation is that their experts are online 24-7 so you can expect responses to your project 10 minutes after you post them. As we mentioned in the case of hosting companies, a quick response is essential to get your blog back online!

In the Meantime…

4. Communication: Let Your Readership Know

It’s down and you have someone working on getting it back up. Because you have a lot of loyal readers and users, some of them will notice that one of their favourite blogs is down – and might start panicking ever more than you, thinking that you decided to stop publishing. Which is exactly why you need to react over all your other communication channels as soon as possible. Tweet that your website is down and you’re working on it. Publish a Facebook status with a photo ensuring that your blog will soon be up. If the problem persists for hours, be sure to even send an email to your mailing list, letting them know that you’re going to be back up soon. To make it easier for you, especially if you’re reading this post while your blog is down, here are some examples:

Examples of tweets:

• [BRB] YOURBLOG is down for a bit while we fix some server issues. No worries! 🙂
• [DON’T WORRY] While our YOURBLOG is experiencing some downtime, we’re here to tweet-chat with you! 😀
• [DOWNTIME] Is YOUTBLOG down? Yes it is, but we’re working on it and will be back soon!

Example of a Facebook post:

• [BRB] YOURBLOG is down, but don’t worry. We’re working to fix the issue at hand while YOURBLOG rests a bit from providing you with interesting content all year long. We all need a nap sometimes, right?

No panicking necessary because I’m sure that your readers will understand that every website, including your blog, experiences some downtime at some point of their “life”.

5. Meta: Prepare Some ‘Here’s What We Learnt Content’

Meta, ha? 😉 As you can see, we used the downtime of the .Me blog as a good reason to write this meta-post on what do when something like that happens! Why don’t you do the same and create some unique content about what you learnt that is based on your own industry, topic or expertise. If you deal with finance for example, write an analysis of how much that particular downtime cost you – and why. If you write about meditation, create a “downtime” meditation routine that helps people deal with the stress of having their website down for the count. There are dozens of ways you can create “meta content” that will be both interesting as well as unique.

Hopefully, your website isn’t down by the time that you’ve read this paragraph, because either the company you’re hosting the website with or your team has been hard at work fixing the issue that took it down in the first place. If, however, you’re facing a bit more time offline, don’t worry. Like our own blog, your blog will survive and get back online soon!