By far the single biggest reason for our team getting cursed out via Live Chat, on the Phone, or though our Support Ticket System is customers reaching out that their site is down.
I agree – downtime sucks! Working online there is not a more helpless feeling than not being able to reach your website.
But sometimes things are always as they appear! Over the last year, we’ve had under 2 hours of downtime across all our servers (thousands of websites).
Confirm Your Website Is Down
Not to say we’re never going to have downtime (I don’t want to jinx us), but before jumping to the conclusions, there are a couple of tests you should conduct:
- Go to your website on your smartphone using the cellular network (not wifi)
- Check our Network Status page (updated in real time)
If you’re able to access your website on your phone and the Network Status page isn’t showing any red, you’ve most likely gotten your IP in our firewall.
Trust me, if we were having any type of outage, our team knows about it as soon as it happens.
All of our iPhones play head-blasting alarms, we get PUSH notifications, and our 24/7/365 monitoring department lights up red with a siren. It’s seriously like the apocalypse. Ask my wife about those 3 a.m. alarms!
Why Your IP Gets Blocked
This can happen for a number of reasons, but the most common is failed login attempts via cPanel, FTP, or email.
If you accidentally enter the wrong credentials in a certain amount of time, our server will look at you like a threat and block your IP.
While this can be super annoying, there is a way around it.
Have our support team whitelist your IP when you signup!
By default, we try to manually do this, but if your IP address is dynamic it can change from time to time. A good practice is to get your IP from these websites and report it to our support team:
If you conduct the above tests above and conclude it’s your IP simply submit a new ticket with your current IP address and we’ll get it unblocked ASAP!
Why The Firewall Is Important
There is a lot that goes on “behind the scenes” that you never see. Unfortunately just as the Internet provides us Entrepreneurs a number of opportunities, it also provides these to scammers, hackers, and other evil-doers.
Our firewall and blocking system protects far many threats than it accidentally blocks customers. Without it, our systems wouldn’t be near as safe and secure to host your website.
So while this little hiccup can be annoying, the benefits are well worth it!
In conclusion, always check another source before reaching out claiming your website is down. In the rare event this does happen, rest assured we’re working as quickly and efficiently as possible to get things back online.
We hate it worse than you do; our reputation depends on it.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding our firewall or how it works – feel free to let us know!
Ryan Gray is the founder and CEO of NameHero, one of the fastest growing independent web hosts in the United States. Ryan has been working online since 1998 and has over two-decades experience in Internet Entrepreneurship.
You should put a “unbann ip” button inside our accounts for us to do that…
There is one 🙂 . Look under the “Support” tab in the Client Portal: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3cuwvfox6l2bilc/Screenshot%202017-09-23%2007.49.19.png?dl=0