Archive for April, 2010

“Why is my website down?”

I recently had a phone call from a client who was frantic about how their website and e-mail had suddenly stopped working a few days prior.  We were receiving the phone calls because we just so happened to have made some DNS changes per the clients request.  Naturally they assumed we had broken something even though for the first 24 hours it worked perfectly.  Once we got around to actually doing a lookup on the domain name (it wasn’t registered through us) we discovered the domain had expired the day before it went missing on the Internet.

Often we have new clients contact us wanting to get away from their current web hosting company as quickly as possible.  They’re usually coming from the super cheap hosting companies and failed to read the fine print and are ready for some real hosting service.  When they come, they want to bring their domain name with them for that added sense of security and to make sure the old hosting company doesn’t hold it hostage.  When a domain transfer is ordered, what are the proper steps to ensure your site stays online and in your haste you don’t end up with days of a down website because of transfer delays?  We’re here to help.

So you have a domain name, now what?  Many people order domain names and don’t worry about the complicated things like what are my DNS servers and do I need to change or update them.  If you have ordered your domain name with a hosting package, everything should come pre-configured to work with your hosting company and you don’t have to worry about what happens in the background.