Glitches in Your Matrix?

The Five Nines of Uninterrupted Service And The Downtime Action Plan…
Midphase signs on the dotted line when it comes to uptime. It’s one of our ‘things’ that we strive for 99.999 percent availability, which amounts to less than five minutes and 26 seconds of downtime a year.
However, sometimes, downtime can be caused by factors that are totally out of anyone’s control. A massive five percent of the world’s downtime is caused by natural disasters, for example! And even the biggest websites experience ‘glitches in their matrixes’ once in a while – last week Facebook was down for 30 minutes.
So, in case of emergency, it’s important to have a downtime action plan. Here are some steps you can take when you experience downtime, which will ensure your site is up and running again as fast as possible.
1.       Be sure your site is actually down.
First things first, if you get a complaint that your website is down, the first thing you want to do is make sure that it’s actually down. You can check this by visiting your site and pressing Shift while you click the refresh button to be sure that you are not just seeing a cached version. There are also websites available that will load your website around the globe to check for downtime. These include Where’s It Up? and Down For Everyone or Just Me?
2.       Try to find out why it’s down
Try to login to your hosting account, because your control panel may be able to pinpoint why your website is down. This will also allow you to check if it is time to renew your domain or if you may have forgotten a payment.
Apart from the above, there are a multitude of reasons why your site could be down, but there are a few steps you can take from within your control panel to see if it is something you can fix on your own.
·         Check the permissions on your public_html directory to ensure they are correct.
·         Check the DNS setting for your domain and make sure they are pointed in the right location. To easily find your IP address and check the DNS propagation go to whatsmydns.net
·         Look at the site content inside the public_html to make sure there is an index.php or index.html file.
3.       Ping your website.
Ping is a basic Internet program that allows you to verify that the behind the scenes tech of your website is able to accept requests. You can ping your website through the command prompt using your IP address. Every operating system has a command prompt – the Window’s one, for example, can be found by pressing the start button and typing ‘cmd’ into the search panel. Alternatively, you can use the website just-ping.com.
If all this sounds like a headache, carry out step four and skip to step five.
4.       Notify your users.
This is a very important step that can save you a lot of time later on. If you’re still experiencing difficulties at this point, it is a good idea to post about your technical difficulties on your social media sites and update the status frequently. People will usually check Twitter after they notice that a site is not responding. This will let your users know that you are aware of the problem and are doing your best to restore your site to working conditions. This is also a good time to pause any advertisement accounts to save you some money.
5.       Contact your hosting company.
Check the Midphase status page to see if there is any news on downtime. If there’s nothing posted there, Midphase’s support teams are here to help with any problems you may have. Make sure you have your primary domain name on hand when you get in touch.
6.       Stay calm.
Everyone experiences downtime, so do your best to stay calm. While it’s extremely frustrating most problems can be resolved in a relatively short amount of time.