Your Site Went Down and the Host Says Everything Is Fine
"We see no issues on our end" is technically true more often than it is helpful. The server can be perfectly healthy while your site is unreachable, because a website depends on several systems that different companies operate. Work through them in this order.
1. Is it down for everyone, or just you?
Check from your phone on cellular data, and use a third-party "is it down" checker. If it loads elsewhere, the problem is local: your ISP's DNS cache, your office network, or a security tool blocking the domain. Flush your DNS cache and try a different network before escalating.
2. Is it DNS?
DNS is the most common cause of an outage that the host cannot see. Something changed a record, a domain expired, or a nameserver update propagated badly. Look up your domain's A record and confirm it points at your host's IP. If the domain itself expired, no amount of server health matters.
3. Is it the certificate?
An expired SSL certificate produces a full-page browser warning that most visitors will not click through. The site is technically up and commercially down. Certificates usually auto-renew; renewal fails when DNS changed, when a redirect blocks the validation request, or when a plugin is intercepting the validation path.
4. Is it the application?
If the server responds but the site shows a 500 error or a blank page, the platform is failing, not the hardware. Common causes: an update that conflicted, a plugin that hit a fatal error, a database connection failure, or a PHP version bump applied by the host. Enable error logging or ask the host for the last 100 lines of the error log; that log names the culprit in most cases.
What to have ready before it happens
- Uptime monitoring that texts you, so you learn from a robot rather than a customer.
- Login access to the registrar, DNS host, and web host, in one document.
- A recent, tested backup.
- The host's support channel that gets a human fastest, phone or chat, noted in advance.
Outages are short when someone knows where to look and long when they do not. If you would rather not be the person looking, that is one of the things our care plans exist to cover.
