Troubleshooting
When it breaks on a Friday night
Eight situations you meet sooner or later when you look after other people’s websites. Every page opens with the moves rather than the theory: the answer first, the explanation underneath for anyone still reading.
The site is broken right now
The client has called, or is about to. These three pages open with the moves, and every move says how long it really takes.
A domain expired: what to do, and how long you have left
An expired domain is almost never lost. Between the expiry date and the moment it goes back on sale there is a sequence of stages, and you are standing in one of them.
Open the pageThe certificate expired on a weekend: bringing the site back
The site is not broken. The browser is refusing it because its certificate is no longer valid — and a certificate can be reissued in minutes, Sunday included.
Open the pageA client lost their domain name: what is still possible
“Lost” means different things depending on where the name has got to. The status published by the registry says which, in one word, and that word decides what remains possible.
Open the page
No alarm goes off, and it costs a fortune
Nothing is down. These are the situations that wake up at the worst moment: a domain in a departed agency’s name, authentication that decayed on its own, a site inherited without its access.
Chrome says “Not secure” on your client’s site
Three unrelated faults produce the same word in the address bar. Until you have told them apart, you are repairing at random.
Open the pageYour client’s email is going to spam
It is almost never the content of the messages. It is the domain’s authentication failing, and a received message tells you precisely which part.
Open the pageI changed the DNS and nothing happened
The change is almost always already live. What has not moved is one of the caches between you and the zone — unless you edited a zone that nothing queries any more.
Open the pageThe domain is in the previous agency’s name
The client believes they own their domain name, and the previous agency is listed as the registrant. Until that is corrected, the agency decides the fate of the site, the mail and the renewal.
Open the pageTaking over a client’s site that somebody else built
It is not the code that stops you, it is the access list. A site taken over without the five accounts that matter hands you the responsibility without the means to carry it.
Open the page
Why these pages exist
Because when a site breaks, nobody is trying to understand DNS: they are trying to find out what to do, in what order, and how long it will take. Every deadline, procedure and threshold quoted here comes from a primary source — ICANN, Afnic, an RFC, the vendor’s own documentation — and the source is named under the block that uses it. A troubleshooting page that gives a wrong deadline costs somebody their domain.
See also the guides, for the reading you do when nothing is on fire