You typed your own address into a browser and got an error page instead of your site. Or worse, a customer told you first — which means it has been down longer than you know. Before you call anyone or change anything, spend ten minutes working out which kind of down this is — the fix for one cause can make another worse.
Websites go dark for four reasons far more often than all the others combined, and each leaves a fingerprint you can read without being technical.
First, check whether it's down for everyone
Sometimes the site is fine and your connection is the problem. Two quick tests settle it. Load the site on your phone with Wi-Fi off, so the request travels over the mobile network. Then try any of the free "is it down for everyone or just me" checker sites, which test your address from somewhere else on the internet.
If the site loads on your phone, the outage is local: your computer, your router or your office network. Restart the router, try another browser, and stop worrying about the website. If it's down from everywhere, keep reading.
The four usual suspects, in order
The first two take about two minutes each to rule out.
An expired domain
The giveaway: your email stops working at the same time, and the address often shows a page of ads — a parking page — rather than an error. Domains are rented, not owned; when the yearly renewal fails — usually an expired card — the whole thing switches off.
To check, search for "whois lookup", put your domain into any of the free lookup tools, and read the expiry date. If it has passed, renew immediately at your registrar — the company you originally bought the domain from — and nowhere else. Most registrars hold a grace period after expiry, but it does not last forever. The full rescue, including what happens once the grace period lapses, is in our guide to expired domains.
An expired security certificate
Here the browser doesn't say the site is missing — it warns you off it. "Your connection is not private", "this site's security certificate has expired", or an error code with CERT in it. Read the warning closely: it usually states the certificate's expiry date outright.
This is the least serious of the four: the site is running; browsers just refuse to open the door. Most hosts issue free certificates that renew themselves, and a renewal silently failing is a classic cause — one message to your hosting company usually fixes it the same day. The detail is in the 'Not Secure' warning guide.
A hosting or server fault
An error with a number on it — 500, 502, 503 — is slightly encouraging: a server answered, so your domain and DNS are fine. Something is broken on the hosting side.
Search for your hosting company's name plus "status" and check their status page. If they report an incident, the outage is theirs and the honest move is to wait it out. If their status is green, the problem is your account or your site: hosting suspended over a failed payment, a site that ran out of allocated resources, or — the classic on WordPress — a plugin update that broke everything at two in the morning.
A DNS change gone wrong
DNS is the internet's address book — it turns your domain name into the location of your server. When it's wrong, browsers say things like "server IP address could not be found", or your address loads somebody else's page entirely.
The tell here is recent change. Did anyone touch anything in the past few days — a new email service, a new host, a marketing agency "updating some settings"? DNS changes take hours to spread across the internet, so a mistake made yesterday afternoon surfaces this morning, long after everyone has forgotten touching it. The fix is putting the records back exactly as they were, which is why the first question for whoever made the change is what, precisely, they changed.
Who to contact, and what to have ready
Match the contact to the fingerprint: the registrar for an expired domain, the hosting company for certificates and server errors, and whoever made the change for DNS. If you don't know who your registrar or host is — common when a long-gone web designer set everything up — the whois lookup names the registrar, and searching your inbox for the domain name plus "invoice" or "renewal" usually surfaces the host.
Before you call, have four things: the exact error text (a phone photo of the screen is fine), when it started, what changed recently, and whether email stopped too. That last one separates a domain problem from a hosting problem. If you'd rather skip the hold music, a technician on Koadi can usually tell you which of the four it is over a screen-share in minutes — the fingerprints are that distinctive.
The panic mistakes
Outages make people do expensive things quickly. Don't do these:
- Don't renew the domain anywhere but your own registrar. Expired domains attract official-looking "final notice" emails from companies you have never dealt with. Some are scams; others re-register your domain through a reseller and make getting it back slower and more expensive.
- Don't migrate to a new host mid-outage. Moving a site you cannot currently see is how the only good backup gets lost. Diagnose first; if the outage convinces you to switch, do it calmly afterwards — choosing hosting is a decision worth an hour, not a panic.
- Don't keep changing DNS records to see what helps. Every change takes hours to show, so rapid-fire edits leave you unable to tell which version of the settings you are looking at.
- Don't pay anyone who contacts you about the outage. Registrars and hosts do not cold-call. Anyone who calls offering to recover your site found out about the outage the same way your customers did.
- Don't delete or reinstall anything — not the site, not the hosting account, not the "broken" plugin folder. Recovery is nearly always easier than rebuilding.
Find out first next time
Every one of the four causes gives you a better morning if a machine tells you before a customer does. Free uptime monitors check your site every few minutes from outside and email or text you the moment it stops answering. Setting one up takes minutes; do it the day the site comes back.
Then close off the two most preventable causes. Turn on auto-renew for the domain and check the card on file isn't about to expire — and put the renewal date in your calendar anyway, because a domain expiry is the only outage that publishes its date a year in advance. Ask your host to confirm the certificate renews automatically, and take screenshots of your DNS settings while everything works, so "put it back the way it was" is possible. If you'd rather all of this simply be someone's job, managed hosting with monitoring, backups and certificate renewals included exists for exactly this reason.
If you'd rather hand it off while it's still broken
Website repair is work Koadi Technology does every week — sites down, error pages, domain rescues, certificate fixes. Post the problem free, in plain words: "site down since Tuesday, error 503, host says everything is fine." Vetted, identity-verified technicians pick it up; you set a fixed price or take bids, and payment sits in escrow until you approve the fix, so the site is back before any money moves. Nearly all of it happens remotely — help in minutes anywhere in the US, evenings and weekends included — with on-site visits through local technicians when hands are needed.