Uptime.com Blog

Create a Website Downtime Plan and Avoid a Crisis

When a website goes down, there is a panic among website owners to get the site back up and running – and fast. Getting the site working again is only part of the challenge, so what should businesses have in their downtime game plan?

List of Contacts

This is the first place to start for companies that work with a web-hosting provider, which will be just about everyone. As soon as the website goes down, the website’s owner must be able to contact the provider. In order to do so, a current list of contacts, both over the phone and email, must be kept. That makes sure that a person can be reached, along with a backup in case communication fails.

Social Media Strategy

When a website goes down, businesses still need to be able to reach customers. It’s easy to sometimes try to fix the site without anyone noticing, but that’s a fool’s errand. The best thing is for businesses to send out a note on social media that acknowledges the outage and gives an estimated time when services will be back. This is true even at odd hours, such as 3:00 AM.

A Post-Mortem

For major outages, businesses need to be able to go back and see exactly what happened. Did the crash happen because of a problem with the provider? Did the crash happen because of an unexpected influx of traffic? Did someone download a virus onto the site that customers now get? There are many reasons a site crashes, but in order to stop it from happening again, website owners need to be able to go back to see exactly what happened to diagnose the problem. Sometimes when the crash is over, site owners are too relieved to think about the why, but taking time to look back is an important part that should not be overlooked.

Michael Esposito