Help! My site is down!

"My website just crashed."
"My site is spinning."
I'm getting a "Site Cannot Be Reached" error.
"Service Unavailable."
"The server is temporarily unable to service your request." 

Chances are if you're reading this article, you're currently feeling a little panicky because your site isn't loading. Let's walk through some steps to get you back online quickly!

CONTACT US

During business hours, include "urgent" in the subject line of your email to support@agathongroup.com, and we'll get a notification right away.

Our emergency line is always available as well, whether it's during regular business hours or overnight, at (888) 543-9766.

Step #1: Determine who is experiencing an error

→ Visit downforeveryoneorjustme.com

Enter your URL to determine whether the site is down across the internet or only for you. If it's just you, continue reading. Otherwise, proceed to Step #2.

→ Visit your site using a different browser or device

Because of the caching you have in place, your website may be loading just fine for users even if it's struggling for you as a logged-in user. If the site loads properly for you in a browser or device where you're not logged in, you can rest assured that your site is still receiving visitors.

We still want to figure out what's causing the issue, so our next step is to determine whether the error is occurring for logged in users across different devices and/or IP addresses or if it's specific to your IP address.

→ Log into your dashboard on your phone

If you're able to access the dashboard using a different browser or IP address, it's possible your IP address has been blocked, in which case you can email our team, and we can unblock it for you. (Find your IP address using this tool.)

Step #2: Provide these details to our team

If you've already emailed support, reply to the ticket with the results of your test above. That will help speed up our investigation and fix.

What it means if the site errors out when you're logged into the dashboard

If you're not able to access the site once you log in (but can access it as a regular visitor), there are a couple of common possibilities:

• Higher-than-normal load due to a DDoS attack. Hackers can overload a website in an attempt to log in. We recommend installing both the Stop XML-RPC Attack and Move Login plugins to mitigate these types of attacks. If it's underway already, our team will identify the source of the attack and block those users to reduce the load on the server.
  
  
• A full disk. When your server runs out of available disk space, it can cause things to slow down or break. We monitor for this on a regular basis but the disk will occasionally fill up in between checks, often due to stored backups:
  
  
  • If you're using UpdraftPlus for daily backups (which we recommend!), you want to store your backups offsite using something like Dropbox or Google Drive rather than keeping them on your server. Older stored backups can contribute to the disk space issue. In addition, we recommend unchecking the Uploads option to reduce the size of your daily backups since those files don't change very often.
    
    
  • Similarly, if you're using Shortpixel or Imagify to optimize your images, those backups can quickly overwhelm your available disk space. We recommend moving these backups to their own, separate storage so that they doesn't impact the disk space on your server. This additional storage is $0.20/GB/month and usually adds just $2-3/month to your total cost.

In either scenario, our team is here to help get your site up and running again. Submit a ticket (if you haven't already!), and we'll take a look.