RunCabin Blog · Fix-it guide

Is my website down? How to check, and get told next time

October 27, 2026 · 7 min read

Short answer: open your site on your phone with Wi-Fi turned off, then paste the address into a free "is it down" checker. If both fail, it is down for everyone, and the cause is almost always one of five things: an expired domain, a failed hosting payment, an expired security certificate, a changed DNS record, or the host having a bad day. Below is how to tell which one in a couple of minutes, what to do about each, and how to get a text the next time instead of hearing it from a customer.

Step 1: Is it down for everyone, or just you?

Half the "my site is down" calls are a problem on one computer or one network. Rule that out first:

1. Phone, Wi-Fi off. Open the site on cellular data. If it loads, your site is fine and the problem is your office internet, router, or computer.
2. A free checker. Paste your address into downforeveryoneorjustme.com or a similar site. It loads your page from its own servers and tells you whether it answered.
3. Type the address exactly. Try it with and without "www." in front. A site that works at one and not the other has a DNS problem, covered below.

If the checker says it is up and your phone loads it, stop here: clear your browser's cache, restart the router, and move on with your day.

Step 2: Read what the error actually says

The error message tells you more than it looks like it does. The common ones, in plain English:

The five usual reasons a business website goes dark

1. The domain name expired

This is the big one for small businesses. Domains renew once a year, the renewal notice goes to an email address someone set up years ago, the card on file expired, and one morning the address shows a parking page. Look your domain up at lookup.icann.org: it shows the expiration date and which company it is registered with. If it just expired, log in to that registrar and renew it now. Most registrars hold an expired domain for a grace period before anyone else can buy it, and renewing within that window usually brings the site back within hours.

If you don't know who registered it (a designer who left, a nephew, a previous partner), the lookup shows the registrar, and that registrar's support line is where you start. Our post on what to do when your web designer disappears walks through getting it back.

2. The hosting bill failed

Hosting companies suspend a site a few days after a payment fails. Search your email for the hosting company's name and "payment failed", "suspended" or "past due", then update the card. Sites usually come back within minutes of payment.

3. The security certificate expired

The certificate is what gives your site the padlock and the "https". Most hosts renew it automatically, but it can lapse after a domain moves or DNS changes. Visitors see a scary full-screen warning, and most of them leave. Your host's support can reissue it, usually the same day.

4. Someone changed the DNS records

DNS is the address book that tells the internet where your site and your email live. It gets changed when someone sets up business email, verifies the domain with Google, or moves the site to a new host, and one wrong edit takes the site down while everything else looks normal. If the site broke right after an email or Google setup, that change is your first suspect. Ask whoever made it to put the old records back. If your email broke at the same time, see our post on business email addresses.

5. The host is having an outage

Sometimes it really is them. Search "[your host's name] status" to find their status page, which lists current outages. If it is theirs, there is nothing to fix on your side but waiting, and it is worth a note on your Google Business Profile if it lasts more than an hour or two.

The quiet failure: the site is up, but the form isn't

A website can look perfect while its contact form has been broken for weeks. The form posts to a service that changed, the emails start landing in spam, or the address it sends to was a former employee's. Nothing shows an error. The phone just gets quieter.

Once a month, fill out your own form from your phone, as a customer would, and make sure the message arrives. Check the spam folder too. It takes a minute and it is the only test that catches this.

How to get told next time, before a customer tells you

Free uptime monitors check your site every few minutes and email or text you when it stops answering. UptimeRobot and Better Stack are two well-known ones. Setup takes about five minutes: make an account, add your website address, and choose how you want to be alerted. Read the free plan's terms before you rely on it, since some limit commercial use or check less often than the paid plans.

Then do the two things that prevent most outages in the first place:

• Turn on auto-renew for your domain, and make sure the card on file is current. Put the expiration date in your calendar a month ahead anyway.
• Make sure renewal and billing emails go to an inbox you actually read, not an old Hotmail address or a designer's email.

Where RunCabin fits

Most outages come from the pieces being spread across different companies: the domain at one, the hosting at another, the certificate somewhere in between, and nobody watching any of it. When RunCabin builds your site, the domain, the hosting and the security certificate sit with one company on one bill, and the domain stays yours. It starts at $499 to build, then $39.99 a month for hosting (or $479.88 a year). We build it with AI so it's fast, then a web developer finishes every page, and you'll see your first version within 24 hours of sending your answers and photos.

If your site already runs on RunCabin and you use an AI assistant like Claude or ChatGPT with it, you can just ask the assistant "is my website up?". It checks that the site is serving, that every contact form on it is hooked up, and how many visitors it had this week. That answers when you ask; it isn't an alarm, so a free uptime monitor is still worth setting up alongside it. See how to connect and manage your website with AI.

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Related reading: my web designer disappeared · business email addresses · how often should I update my website?