There are a variety of differents reasons and circumstances as to why a client’s website is down.
Server is down
It is important to remember that if a website is down because of something on our end all the websites will be down! So check some other websites off the top of your head to rule out this first factor. You can also use Down For Everyone or Just Me?
A record has not been set up correctly
The next thing to check will be to see if the website works without the www. in front (so for example, the website loads fine at www.rm-law.com.au and rm-law.com.au). If it doesn’t work without the www. in front, the client probably still needs to set up the A record on the root domain pointing towards 54.83.131.198.
CNAME record has not been set up correctly
If the website doesn’t load with or without the www. in front, the next thing to check is the CNAME record has been set up correctly. You can do this by going to MX Toolbox and doing the following search:
If this has been set up correctly, the data in the Domain Name field will be www.[clients-domain-name] and the data in the Canonical Name field will be leapwp.com.au.
Sometimes a domain host or IT support will make up their own rules and have the canonical name as rm-law.leapwp.com.au or rmlaw.com.au (without the www.) – this is incorrect and will break the website when we try to launch it.
The domain has expired
If a client lets their domain name expire, their website and email will go down. Advise the client to contact their domain host immediately to renew the domain and once this has been processed, all services should resume as normal.
Georgia’s Fun Fact
All our websites are hosted on Amazon Cloud Load Balancers, which distribute network traffic across two servers. This increases capacity and reliability, and is why we are able to host as many websites as we do! This is also why we need a CNAME record, instead of the usual A record, in order for the domain to be connected to the website.
If a client’s domain host or IT support isn’t familiar with load balancers, they may question why we require the domain records that we do. The answer to that is that we don’t have one static IP address they can point the domain to, so the CNAME record is the only solution!
No CNAME = A website that won’t be reliably available on the internet = A possible negative impact on the ranking of that site in Google’s index