In the past month, a couple of clients have notified me that their website was down. For them, it was an easy process to correct the issue. They reached out to us at Full Scope and we walked them through fixing the issue. In each of these particular cases, the domain names had expired. We were able to walk them through the process of getting the domain name renewed. If you don’t happen to host your website with Full Scope, here are a couple of great tools that can help.

First, go to downforeveryoneorjustme.com. Simply load the site and enter in your domain name. You will get a notification telling you if the site is down for everyone or if it’s just down for you. If it is just you, you’ll want to check if there is a firewall blocking you from getting to your site. On the other hand, if it is down for everyone, you know to get in touch with your hosting provider as the problem is occurring for your customers as well.

Another helpful tool, although a bit more technical, is whatsmydns.net. Each website is hosted on a server that is assigned an IP address (1.2.3.4 or 48.38.74.89 for example). It’s not a bad idea to figure out what IP address your site is on and keep that information stored somewhere. If you find that the IP address is different from what it’s been in the past, there’s a good possibility that something changed with your domain name’s DNS settings. If your domain name is stored with a registrar such as GoDaddy or ENOM, log in there and see if anything has changed.

Finally, you can also run a WHOIS search at http://whois.icann.org/ . Doing so will give you a detailed report that includes the domain name servers and settings for the domain name. The main piece of information to look for here is the name servers. When your site is up and running, make note of what the name servers are set to. They’ll be something like “ns1.fullscopehost.com” and “ns2.fullscopehost.com” or something similar. If the name servers have changed, again, log in to your domain name registrar and see what was changed.

If you are a Full Scope Creative client who experiences your site being down, just reach out to us. We’ll go through to check for any potential causes of the problem and correct them to get your website back up and running quickly. If you don’t host with us, we will still do as much as possible to help. The three steps above are the first steps we take in order to find out what is going on with the website.