If you’re on shared hosting like I am, every once in a while your website will go down. It’s just a fact of life, that due to forces beyond your control, something will happen to cause your website to be unavailable.

First off, don’t panic. This happens to all of us. The sky is not falling.

Secondly, contact your hosting company immediately – do not wait and hope it will get better on it’s own. While it’s possible that your hosting company knows about the issue and is already working to fix it – it might not – and it’s up to you to notify them. If you don’t know who your hosting company is, read this article.

Because having my website stay up is important to me and my business, I use Web-Stat to tell me when my website is down. It checks every 15 minutes and if it can’t connect to my website, it sends me an email.

Shared hosting is inexpensive, at DreamHost.com, where I have my own site and many of my clients’ sites, it’s $10 a month. But shared hosting means that your website will go down everyone once in a while. If and when it does, let your hosting company know. If your company is DreamHost.com, you can submit a support ticket to them.

My hosting company is no longer Dreamhost – after being with them for 6 long years, they finally did something so unforgivable to my website and the sites of my clients, we left them behind. We’re  now at BlueHost.

So if you discover your website is down – take a deep breath and contact your hosting company, then try to relax. I know it’s awful, but most hosting companies will have problems like these fixed quickly.

If you found this article helpful, please take a moment to share it with your friends, it will be much appreciated. Thanks! Jill