It doesn’t matter how big or small your site is. It doesn’t matter who you are. It can happen when you least expect it. You may been sleeping, at your day job, cooking dinner, at your friend’s house or even on holiday. The nightmare of your website crashing can come true. In order to minimise loss of traffic, sales and profits, it is important that you know exactly what to do to get your site back online as quickly as possible.

Very few web hosts guarantee that your site will be up and functional one hundred percent of the time. Even with a 99.9% uptime your site will be down for just over 10 minutes per week, so you are bound to find your site is down over some point during the course of its lifetime. However, this does not mean you should sit back and do nothing, it is more than worth checking for the more obvious causes of downtime, some of which are explored below.

It may not be your site that is the problem, instead it could simply be your internet connect. Make sure all of the leads are plugged in properly and hit the refresh button. The vast majority of the time you will find that your site is in fact working after all. If not continue on to the steps below.

Perhaps, the second biggest cause of website downtime is lack of available bandwidth. If your site has had a sudden increase in traffic over the course of the month then you may find that all of the bandwidth you have purchased has been used up. In such cases your site will be down until you purchase additional bandwidth from your host. It is often cheaper to upgrade your hosting package rather than buy small amounts of extra bandwidth when needed.

The final way to resolve your hosting problem is, of course, to contact your host. Depending on the strength of their customer services and technical departments, the problem should be sorted promptly, however, this really is a case of you get what you pay for. Budget web hosts tend to be slower at sorting out problems.