For Newcastle businesses with a site down right now
Most sites that go down are not hacked. They have simply stopped being paid for.
A report on your own site, showing what it runs on, when it was last updated and whether a backup exists.
By Reece Rainer
spareday, Newcastle NSW
Last updated
13 September 2026
Read time
2 minutes
Since it went live my phone hasn’t stopped ringing.
He created a stunning website for us that captures and nurtures leads with an automated email marketing system, which has filled a huge gap in the business and saved a lot of time (and money!).
Reece has been generous, reliable and knowledgeable in creating an online presence for our sporting club. He is good to work with and has good technical abilities.
A website that is down is rarely a mystery, and it is rarely an attack. Four causes account for almost all of them.
What follows is the order to check them in, because three of the four can be settled without anybody touching the site itself.
Whether the site is down for everyone or only for you, and whether the domain and hosting are still paid. Those two questions resolve most outages before anybody is called.
A site that looks dead from your desk is often perfectly healthy, so the first job is proving the problem is real.
An expired domain, a lapsed security certificate, an update that broke something, and a hosting account suspended over an unpaid invoice. Attacks are far rarer than any of them.
Each has a different fix and a different timeline, and only one of the four needs anybody to look at the code.
Three things, and they are what stop the same outage happening twice.
An outage is usually a warning about something that was already true, so the fix is worth finishing properly.
Related reading from us: web hosting in Newcastle.
Whether it is down for everyone rather than just you, then whether the domain and hosting renewals are actually paid. Those two answer most outages.
Far less often than people expect. An expired domain, a lapsed certificate or a failed update cause the great majority of outages.
An expired renewal can be minutes once it is paid. A broken update depends entirely on whether a working backup exists.
That is normally a lapsed security certificate. The site is intact, but visitors are being warned before they reach it.
One monthly fee covering everything, month to month, no lock-in. The number depends on the business and gets given on the call.