We’re proud to say that when sites are hosted on our hosting service and have a care plan enabled, there is almost never downtime! But we get it, emergencies happen and not everything can be prevented (especially those kind of outages that also take down giants like Netflix 😨).
Or maybe your client forgot to renew their domain name right before a launch, managed to ignore all our messages, and their site goes offline… True story. 🤦
What is considered an emergency
A lot of things can go wrong with a website; here’s what we treat as an emergency:
- A site is offline, displaying an error when you try to visit, or has been hacked.
- An issue is preventing the client from accepting orders, payments, or leads.
What to do in the case of an emergency
We do our best to be responsive in emergencies, but the best path of action differs depending on whether or not it happens during business hours or not.
During business hours
Follow our typical support procedures by either:
- Emailing our shared email address.
- Contacting us in Slack.
During business hours, this is the way to get the fastest response. We’re constantly monitoring these channels and we’ll be able to jump in and assist. If you’ve sent us a Slack message or email, no additional action is needed.
As a reminder, our business hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. ET to 5 p.m. PT. That’s:
- 9 a.m. – 8 p.m. ET
- 6 a.m. – 5 p.m. PT
Outside of business hours
After business hours, our email and Slack channels are not constantly monitored. However, they remain the best place to fill us in. Follow these steps in an after-hours emergency:
- Send the details to our shared email address or Slack channel.
- Send a text message with only the word EMERGENCY to (323) 645-4218.
This bypasses our team’s personal notification settings so please use this intentionally.
Emergency Prevention
With our care plans, we have monitoring in place for domain renewals, SSL renewals, downtime detection, and security scanning. If we detect an upcoming issue (like a domain renewal) we let your client know so that they can proactively take action and avoid an emergency.
If a downtime incident or security issue happens we are typically alerted within 5 minutes and will make every effort to proactively resolve ASAP. If a site is down for at least 15 minutes and we do not have a resolution in place, we will also reach out to your client to let them know we’re working on it so that they are aware and can plan accordingly.
Disclaimer: Incidents and emergency support outside of business hours may have longer reply and resolution times. We make every effort to resolve these as quickly as possible, but there may be times where our team is completely offline due to sleep, travel, or time off.
We attempt to cover business hours (and more) as much as possible, but be aware that an issue that occurs at 3 a.m. may not be resolved until 6 or 7 a.m. depending on the time zone.