Some of you have a lot of personal user interaction with the visitors that come to your website. Often people will tell you about their experience with using your website. That is great feedback that you always should listen to.
However, there are situations that cause you stress in particular when people are saying “I can not access your website” or “Your website is down” etc.
How do you know for sure if your website is really down?
First of all, there are lots of reasons why the website is down, or could be down. A good way to make sure that this is not just a ONE USER experience is to test your website. Here are some services you could use to quickly check:
Reasons why your website could be temporarily down are and what you can do:
- The web servers come with an uptime guarantee of 99% that means that 9 hours in a year they possible could be down. Nothing you can do except wait, most of the time it is only a matter of one or two minutes.
- From a browser to the actual place where the files of your website are hold could be a long way and there are several components in the middle who could temporarily experience a problem, meaning your website is also affected even though there is nothing wrong with it. Again, just wait.
- Your website is often cached meaning that the website is not always freshly loaded from your web host but from a cache along the way (ISP) or your server cache. You could try to reload the site directly from the Internet. This can be done by pressing CTRL + F5 keys at the same time. Sometimes a firewall or other security software is disabling you to visit a web page, and there is also a possibility that your ISP has some kind of network problems.
So, keep calm, check your website, most likely there is nothing wrong with it
and if necessary, you know I am always here for you.
