Website is down (I use IdeaHost)

If your website is hosted by IdeaHost and you experience issues you couldn't resolve by yourself, contact their support staff, who will help you resolve the issue and they are available 24/7 for you.

Contact them on: 844-271-6520, or via their live chat service

Maybe the website is down because it suffered a Denial-of-Service (DDOS) attack.

Symptoms of denial-of-service attacks include:

• Unusually slow network performance (opening files or accessing websites)
  
  
• Unavailability of a particular website
  
  
• Inability to access any website
  
  
• High increase in the number of spam emails (this type of DDOS is usually referred to as an e-mail bomb)

If you own the website that might have suffered a DDOS attack, read this article which explains how to defend yourself against future DDOS attacks.

Uptimerobot is a free-of-charge service that tracks the uptime, downtime, and performance of websites.

Uptimerobot may not help you to "wake up" your website again, but it can alert you quickly if it happens in the future (by checking on your website every 5 minutes).

Go to uptimerobot's website , sign up for free and start monitoring your website.

Websites can get infected with viruses just like computers, and start misbehaving. Ask your hosting provider/ server admin to perform a scan instead of you.

Alternatively, you can download all of your website files to your computer (e.g. via FTP-File Transfer Protocol) and scan them through your computer (make sure that you have a good antivirus problem installed e.g. Avira, Avast, and etc., otherwise you risk infecting your computer as well). The main files you need to pay attention to are:

• index.php

• .htaccess

• header.php

• footer.php

• functions.php

• the entire wp-content folder (which contains the plugins and themes)
  
  

Note: Not all types of websites allow you to download the website to your computer.

Maybe your website got hacked. If you detect a suspicious activity on your website or if your browser shows you this message This site may harm your computer when you try to access it, then your website is most likely hacked.

Check the website codes for suspicious lines / recent changes or hire a professional instead. Before you decide to hire a professional, double-check the website to make sure that this is a problem you can't solve.

Note: Read this article, which will inform you how to maintain and protect your website.

Your server might have run out of disk space. If your site gets a lot of traffic then the server logs can rapidly use up the available disk space even when your application’s storage requirements are low.

If possible, free up some disk space by deleting unnecessary media files (e.g. videos, pictures, etc.) hosted on your website. If not, you can always upgrade the hosting plan.

When you type an address into your web browser, your computer uses DNS (Domain Name System) to look up and translate that address into a computer-friendly IP address. In other words, the DNS has the role of a librarian, who you can ask for a book. Sometimes, the servers your computer uses to look up that information can go down, thus preventing you from loading the desired web site.
 
To learn how to change the DNS settings, check out the don't know how to change the DNS settings solutions

Pingdom is a service that tracks the uptime, downtime, and performance of websites. Pingdom monitors websites from multiple locations globally so that it can distinguish genuine downtime from routing and access problems.

Pingdom may not help you to "wake up" your website again, but it can alert you quickly if it happens in the future.

Go to Pingdom, select and subscribe to a plan and Pingdom will start monitoring your website.

The site might be down due to a programming error. You can check this by visiting the website and see what the status bar at the bottom of the browser says. If it says “Done” or “Loaded,” rather than “Waiting…” or “Connecting…,” the website is working properly, but there is a programming error or misconfiguration.

If you're a developer yourself, check the server´s error log for clues, otherwise talk to the developers of the site and ask them to fix it.

Also check this free-of-charge website, which will point you to issues in the code.

If your website goes down frequently after you have updated a component of it (a plug-in, add-on etc.), or if your host upgraded the OS or made a modification of any kind, then the update itself caused the problem.

Although hosting operators attempt to ensure Ruby, Python, MySQL, PHP, PostgreSQL, etc. remain backward compatible, some files (commands) might have been affected, which caused the website to go down.

Reverse those changes if you made them by yourself (i.e. find the faulty component and reverse the update or even uninstall it), or talk to the hosting operators.

Note: Fixing this issue might take you a lot of time and concentration. Don't modify anything unless you know it's function.