DON’T PANIC

Woke up this morning…da-der-du-duh…saw my website was down…da-der-du-duh…

Anyway, enough of my blues. Here’s a quick tip for those of us who get up in the morning, logon, and go straight to the comments moderation box for our blog to see who’s left a message while we’ve been sleeping. If you get any kind of error, the first think to do is “DON’T PANIC“. I know the next is to fix one’s grammar. The error, unless it’s immediately obvious what the problem is, could be a local issue, it could be a server side problem, you may have been hacked (but that would be probably be one of those immediately obvious things, because the site will have some unintelligible garbage from some “krew” claiming to be fundamental militants or militant fundamentalists or whatever, either way they won’t be able to spell properly).

Okay, so after not panicking what do you do next? A quick page refresh ought to be your next step. That will clear up whether or not the error was something very transient. But, open the page in a different browser might also help just in case it’s the first browser misbehaving. Same error? Well, then it is time to look a little deeper. Check to see whether emails are downloading for your domain, yes, that’s good, you’ll be able to contact tech support at your host later. Can you FTP to your site? Yes? Are all your files there? Yes? That’s good too, means nothing absolutely devastating has happened.

Next can you login into your site admin panel. Often something like http://yoursite.com/cpanel. Is that working okay? Yes? Then goto the server status section (left-hand menu in cPanel installations). Got any red spots in there? That’s a probable if your very first error screen when you woke up this morning referred in any way to MySQL or databases (especially if your site uses blog software). Okay, so we’re getting somewhere. If you can get to phpMyAdmin in cPanel then you might be able to do any necessary repairs yourself. If you cannot, then the next piece of advice is to go for your morning logoff dump, have a coffee/breakfast, say good morning to your spouse, children, pets, toothbrush (in that order) and then come back to your site. Do another page refresh, just in case (you never know, often those transient errors are just that)

If things haven’t changed then don’t get the blues, get in touch with your host’s technical support department (do they have online live assistance like that offered by the excellent and robust hostgator.com and others?), ask them to assist, specifying any specific errors you’ve encountered along the way.

More often than not, they’ll be able to do a quick “reboot” (I use the term loosely to cover all sorts of sins) and fix whatever went wrong. Do that page refresh once again and when your site magically reappears thank Ford you didn’t panic.

Before you ask, yes, the cautionary tale comes from experience, but I pressed the panic button by mistake, forgot my towel, and lived to regret. Next time, I’ll take my own advice.