It’s a website owner’s worst nightmare: You type in your domain, but instead of seeing your beautiful website design, you’re greeted with a blank screen. Panic sets in. How long has it been down? What’s gone wrong? And how can you get it fixed as quickly as possible?It’s likely that most webmasters will experience a similar panic-inducing experience. Michael Osterloh, CEO of the South African hosting company HOSTAFRICA says there are a number of reasons for a website to go down.

“Your site could be the target of hackers looking for data or ransom. It could be a deliberate DDOS attack – that is a deliberate denial-of-service where attackers make your site unusable. It could be something as menial as a minor mistake in your website’s code or even scheduled server maintenance by your web host,” he says of why a site might go down. He also suggests the right way to go about dealing with such an occurrence. “The best thing you can do if your site goes down is be prepared. If your site is currently running smoothly, then it’s the perfect time to draw up plan B.” So here’s what you should remember when doing so.

Know your hostsWhen your site goes down it’s important that you know who to contact. Are you calling the web professionals or the web hosting company? And do you have a good enough relationship with them that they know you. In this regard, make sure you have the right phone number or contact details on hand. You certainly don’t want to be wasting time hunting for the phone number when your site’s down. Every moment it’s down is a loss of revenue and reputation. You should also make sure that you have access to all the relevant IDs and passwords and that your account has an up-to-date list of approved decision makers. The last thing you want to be doing in the event that your site is down is trying to track down the person responsible for the account so that they can give you security approval.

Don’t forget your adsAlong with your web host’s contact details, you should also keep an easily-accessible and up-to-date list of digital ads that are sending visitors to your site. If your site goes down and you’ve prepared a major marketing campaign or you’re sending marketing emails out automatically, these will need to be postponed or put on hold until your site is live again. Think about it. If you’re spending money of a Google Adwords campaign that’s sending people to a dead website then you’re effectively just throwing money away.

Decide on the best way to communicateIf you’ve got an established social media presence it’s easier to communicate these sort of technical difficulties. Twitter or Facebook can provide your customers with real time information and provide a contact touchpoint for them should they have further queries.If you’re not on social media then you should consider contacting your customers via your mailing list. Should your communication be immediate or should you wait until you have a better understanding of what’s happening? That’s something for you to decide based on how serious an issue it is. Either way, it’s advisable that your customers are told timeously.

Back up your sitePerforming a regular (daily) backup of all the systems and data on your site is a basic requirement that every webmaster should get into the habit of doing. Most web hosts do this anyway, but it's a good idea to test them from time to time. Upload a file to your site and then delete it and ask your hosting company to retrieve it. If they can’t within an allotted amount of time, that’s probably a sign that something is wrong and you should take up a grievance with your web host. Aside from that, there is a plethora of software available that’ll let you copy all of your data and files across to your own systems. So do yourself a favour and look into this further.

Consider an uptime monitoring serviceWhile this sort of service won’t prevent your site from going down, it will let you know immediately if it happens. And that can be the difference between a few grumpy customers and all of them. There are a variety of options that you can choose from depending on your needs and budget. One thing to keep in mind is to have the software send your alerts to a contact point that you use regularly. It’s no use having the alerts sent to an email at the same provider as your website since you’re likely to miss them when your site does go down. Choosing to have the alerts sent to you via SMS is a good option as it means you’ll know if your site drops immediately.

While you should be prepared for every scenario, it’s also important to recognise that every site goes down from time to time. Before you leap into action, it’s also vital that you make sure that your site actually is down and that it’s not just your internet connection or browser that’s causing issues. Either way, by following these suggestions you’re likely to have a contingency plan if your site does go down.