Its happened to us all, specially in business. Your sitting behind your desk waiting for the phone to ring and nothing happens.
I guess this ain’t totally abnormal, but after a few days you start to suspect maybe something is wrong. Maybe the economy is running slow again, or a national event?
So, you start doing some Googling and see your website is still being listed in the search engines, but when you click on your link you come to find out your site is completely down!
How long has it been down? how long will it take to get back up? Only if you had known about this when it went down.
Good news, there is a totally free website which can help you.
DownNotifier Can Help
DownNotifier.com is a totally free website which you can use which basically does what the name says.
All you have to do is go to their website, add your website address and email and they will send you an email every time your website goes down.
DownloadNotifier will check your website for you through their automated algorithm every hour and if it sees your website is not up, you will immediately receive an email.
Many people use DownloadNotifier, and it has proven to be very reliable.
I know what you are thinking, if it is free how do they stay in business and they can’t possibly stick around.
There are options. If you are not happy with just receiving an email, you can pay to be notified by text if you need to know straight away as most people aren’t walking around looking at their email, but will usually here or see a text come through tot heir mobile cell phone.
Reasons Your Website Can Go Down
I will expand on this part of the post in a future post as there are literally millions of reasons we see on a regular basis of why your site can go down.
Automatic Updates
If you are using a self hosted type of CMS (Content Management System) it most likely automatically updates itself when needed.
Most of these type of systems also use different themes for your website which also update.
Every site is different and when something is updated it is not uncommon for it to break your website and for it to go down.
Web Host Down
Not all web hosts are the same. There are some very good hosts and some very bad.
Yep, the bad ones go down all the time. In fact, it also happens to the very good ones. And all web hosts do schedule maintenance and updates which can temporarily take your site offline.
Website Viruses
Rather than building every little feature for your website, there are premade plugins you can just download and add.
Some of them are very good. But, anyone can make them, including criminals.
If you download and install an infected plugin or piece of code, it can bring your website down, delete it, infected your users and wipe you off the face of all search engines.
