PostieDay 51 · 20 October 2026
Chapter 2 · 20 days to the chapter deadline
- What Happens When Your Website Goes Down?
What a weird day. A client's website went down. Happens sometimes especially if other developers are doing updates as happened with this client in the past month. I got a random message from this client saying their website is down... so I check myself - sometimes it could be a bad cache or Cloudflare / CDN - especially error 522... not that. When a client is running a site on an external hosting provider (like this one) I then check their status page and what would you believe they had an outage in one of their data centres.
I was out at the time on a date for Vietnamese Woman's Day... worst thing to do on Vietnamese Valentines Day is to pull out a laptop and start debugging. I informed the client and their employees that this occurred and that it should be back up soon. Got off my phone and checked 2 hours later (after seeing the Whale Fall movie) to see missed calls from that client and an explosion of messages in our shared chat with them trying to debug things themselves as one of their other websites (on the same provider) was still up - so "clearly something was wrong with their site right?... not the provider?"
Messaged again saying that they are the same provider and same account yes but they could be hosted on different servers and locations which explains why one site was done but not the other and that I'd talk to them tomorrow. "I know it's hard to sit and wait but please just trust me your site isn't hacked this is an "x provider" problem" we can talk about moving off them tomorrow if you want" and 20 minutes afterwards the site was back.
Not only has this experience made me question everything about my communication style but bringing it back to Postie what happens if Postie goes down? What can I do? I know the best thing I can do is be honest and straight forward in my language giving as much information without being overly technical or unhelpful. If anything I want someone to look at the Postie status page and see "oh okay they'll be back soon".
Communication is not a given. It is not easy. It's a skill I feel like I'm loosing. As someone who used to work in radio this is something extra important to me. You use it or you loose it. Remember that.
Dammit Bob...Dammit Bob...