What To Do When You Cannot Access Your Website
Please note: This article assumes your website is not resolving at all, meaning it's not displaying an error/blank white page, but completely offline.
We hate downtime at NameHero, that's why we've built our cloud to include the best hardware and software in the industry. This combined with our Superhero team accounts for 99.9% website uptime year-over-year since our founding in 2015.
If you cannot access your website, that's not a good thing, and we want to help you get it back up and running as soon as possible.
NameHero is widely known throughout the industry for our extreme reliability (99.9% website uptime, year over year) therefore we're not a host with a lot of server issues. However, sometimes incidents do happen and we have a system in place to keep you informed.
If you cannot access your website, first check https://status.namehero.com and see if we're experiencing any degraded performance. This page is integrated with our internal monitoring system and provides data from checks conducted against each node, every single second. If the issue is on a server/networking level, this page provides a real-time view of that. You can also subscribe to receive these notices automatically.
If there is an issue on our end, we'll keep this page updated on the status until things are back online.
All of our Web Hosting packages include our exclusive Security Shield to protect your website from malicious attacks. While it's designed to keep the bad guys out, sometimes false-positive blocks happen when you accidentally enter an incorrect password multiple times. Most of the time this happens when attempting to login to cPanel or an email account.
If our Network Status page is reporting up, but your website is not loading, go to our IP Unblock Page in our Client Area, and check your IP for a block and remove it. This page will automatically detect your current IP; all you have to do is click the Check for IP Block and Remove button.
If you have more than one hosting service, this will check all of them and let you know the results. If there was a block, it will be removed and give you details if they're available. Additionally, if there isn't a block, it'll let you know:
If you have a dynamic IP that changes often, you can always use our free WhatIsYourIP tool to get your current one.
Also, it's a good idea to check your website on your smartphone, with Wifi disabled (so it's not on the same network), to make sure you're not having an ISP/local network block.
ICANN requires all domains registered have a valid email address on file. If you've recently registered, transferred, or updated your domain's contact details, you may have been asked to confirm your email address. If you failed to do this, your domain EPP status will be ON HOLD. Here's an example lookup of NameHero.com which returns clientTransferProhibited, this is a correct status code:
If your domain is showing ON HOLD, this is why your website is not loading. To remove this, you need to locate the verification email, and click the link inside.
This comes from an automated system which sometimes get hung in Spam filters, so make sure to check your Spam/Bulk folder for an email like this:
Clicking that link will verify your contact details and restore your domain's status.
If you're unable to locate the email, please submit a support ticket so our team can have it resent and help you return your domain to normal status.
Please note: Once you verify your information, it may take up to 30 minutes for the domain to return online.
DNS is what connects your domain to your web hosting account. If both your domain and web hosting is with NameHero, these records are automatically setup, and it's rare to have a misconfiguration. However, if you've moved from another web host, are using third-party DNS servers, or have made recent DNS changes, you may have an error.
You can easily rule this out by checking our Free DNS Report Tool, DNSHero.com. Simply enter your domain and click Report:
You want to make sure this report contains no red errors. If you see yellow, you may ignore as most of those are false-positives:
As you can see in the above example, there is no red, one yellow, which is a false-positive, so DNS is configured properly.
If you see red, you want to make sure you're using the nameservers provided in your hosting account welcome email or from inside our client area (i.e. ns73.namehero.net / ns74.namehero.net).
Additionally, you can view/manage your DNS Zone by going to cPanel -> Zone Editor and then click on Manage by the domain in question:
This will list all active DNS records for your domain. If you're using a third-party DNS service such as Cloudflare, these are the records you'll want to ensure are in place inside their interface:
If you've recently moved to NameHero or mistakenly made changes, you can always reset this to default, by clicking the dropdown menu on the cog beside Add Record:
Remember, this resets everything, so any custom changes, such as third-party MX records for services such as G Suite (Google Workspace) will need to be re-added.
You can then recheck your DNSReport to see if this removes the errors (please allow a few minutes for things to update).
Following all of the above steps should resolve almost any connectivity issue you maybe having accessing your website.
We hate downtime at NameHero, that's why we've built our cloud to include the best hardware and software in the industry. This combined with our Superhero team accounts for 99.9% website uptime year-over-year since our founding in 2015.
If you cannot access your website, that's not a good thing, and we want to help you get it back up and running as soon as possible.
1) Check our Network Status Page
NameHero is widely known throughout the industry for our extreme reliability (99.9% website uptime, year over year) therefore we're not a host with a lot of server issues. However, sometimes incidents do happen and we have a system in place to keep you informed.
If you cannot access your website, first check https://status.namehero.com and see if we're experiencing any degraded performance. This page is integrated with our internal monitoring system and provides data from checks conducted against each node, every single second. If the issue is on a server/networking level, this page provides a real-time view of that. You can also subscribe to receive these notices automatically.
If there is an issue on our end, we'll keep this page updated on the status until things are back online.
2) Check your IP Address for a Firewall Block
All of our Web Hosting packages include our exclusive Security Shield to protect your website from malicious attacks. While it's designed to keep the bad guys out, sometimes false-positive blocks happen when you accidentally enter an incorrect password multiple times. Most of the time this happens when attempting to login to cPanel or an email account.
If our Network Status page is reporting up, but your website is not loading, go to our IP Unblock Page in our Client Area, and check your IP for a block and remove it. This page will automatically detect your current IP; all you have to do is click the Check for IP Block and Remove button.
If you have more than one hosting service, this will check all of them and let you know the results. If there was a block, it will be removed and give you details if they're available. Additionally, if there isn't a block, it'll let you know:
If you have a dynamic IP that changes often, you can always use our free WhatIsYourIP tool to get your current one.
Also, it's a good idea to check your website on your smartphone, with Wifi disabled (so it's not on the same network), to make sure you're not having an ISP/local network block.
3) Check your Domain EPP Status
ICANN requires all domains registered have a valid email address on file. If you've recently registered, transferred, or updated your domain's contact details, you may have been asked to confirm your email address. If you failed to do this, your domain EPP status will be ON HOLD. Here's an example lookup of NameHero.com which returns clientTransferProhibited, this is a correct status code:
If your domain is showing ON HOLD, this is why your website is not loading. To remove this, you need to locate the verification email, and click the link inside.
This comes from an automated system which sometimes get hung in Spam filters, so make sure to check your Spam/Bulk folder for an email like this:
Clicking that link will verify your contact details and restore your domain's status.
If you're unable to locate the email, please submit a support ticket so our team can have it resent and help you return your domain to normal status.
Please note: Once you verify your information, it may take up to 30 minutes for the domain to return online.
4) Check your DNS Report for errors
DNS is what connects your domain to your web hosting account. If both your domain and web hosting is with NameHero, these records are automatically setup, and it's rare to have a misconfiguration. However, if you've moved from another web host, are using third-party DNS servers, or have made recent DNS changes, you may have an error.
You can easily rule this out by checking our Free DNS Report Tool, DNSHero.com. Simply enter your domain and click Report:
You want to make sure this report contains no red errors. If you see yellow, you may ignore as most of those are false-positives:
As you can see in the above example, there is no red, one yellow, which is a false-positive, so DNS is configured properly.
If you see red, you want to make sure you're using the nameservers provided in your hosting account welcome email or from inside our client area (i.e. ns73.namehero.net / ns74.namehero.net).
Additionally, you can view/manage your DNS Zone by going to cPanel -> Zone Editor and then click on Manage by the domain in question:
This will list all active DNS records for your domain. If you're using a third-party DNS service such as Cloudflare, these are the records you'll want to ensure are in place inside their interface:
If you've recently moved to NameHero or mistakenly made changes, you can always reset this to default, by clicking the dropdown menu on the cog beside Add Record:
Remember, this resets everything, so any custom changes, such as third-party MX records for services such as G Suite (Google Workspace) will need to be re-added.
You can then recheck your DNSReport to see if this removes the errors (please allow a few minutes for things to update).
Following all of the above steps should resolve almost any connectivity issue you maybe having accessing your website.
Updated on: 11/10/2024
Thank you!