Is your domain, website and email set up properly?
Type your domain and this checks the things that most often go wrong for a small business: a registration about to lapse, a website that won't load securely, and email records that send your mail to spam. Every problem comes with what to do about it, in plain English.
Free, no account, nothing to sign up for. It only reads what anybody on the internet can already see, and it keeps nothing.
What it looks at
Three things, in about five seconds.
The domain
When the registration runs out, who it's registered with, whether the registry has it on hold, and where its DNS is hosted.
The website
Whether it loads over https, whether plain http visitors are sent there, whether www works too, and who holds the server's address.
Who handles your mail, and whether the SPF, DKIM and DMARC records that keep it out of spam are there and set up properly.
Two more free tools
For the email problems that come up most.
Why did my email bounce?
Paste the "undeliverable" message you got back, and find out what went wrong, whose problem it is, and what to do.
Merge your SPF records
Two SPF records break your email. Get the one correct record to publish, starting from what your domain has now.
Or start with what you can see
Pick the one that sounds like you.
The website won't load
An error page, a blank screen, or a message about the account. What to rule out first, and what each error means.
Customers say my emails never arrived
Bounces, silence, or everything landing in spam. Usually one of four records on your domain.
The browser says Not secure
A warning in the address bar, or a full page telling visitors to go back. Five usual causes.
My site is showing things I didn't put there
Spam pages, strange redirects, or a warning from Google. The first hour, in the right order.
A renewal notice came from a company I don't know
Or you are not sure who your domain is with at all. How to find out, and how to keep it.
The person who built it no longer answers
How to find everything they set up from the outside, and get it back into your name.
I want to leave my host
The order that keeps the website and the email working on the day you switch.
I'm choosing hosting for the first time
What the kinds of hosting are, and the questions that matter more than the specification.
I'm not sure anything is backed up
Six questions to ask your host now, while nothing is wrong.
Before you ring anyone
Three things that make every hosting problem easier.
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Your website, your email and your domain are three different things
They are often with three different companies, and a fault in one rarely means the others are broken. A website that is down while the email still works is a clue, and a useful one to pass on.
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Write down exactly what you see
The words on the error page, the time it started, the device you were using and whether it happens on your phone as well. "It's down" gets a slower answer than those four things.
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The domain is the one to protect
Lose the domain and you lose the website and the email together, and it is the hardest of the three to get back. If you only read one guide before something goes wrong, read who actually controls your domain.
Who writes this
Hosting, domains, email and databases since 1996. Websites are the small part.
I'm Julian Mullins. I look after the servers, domains and mail underneath other people's websites, through my company, Dalaric Limited, and most of what is on this site is what I end up explaining on the phone to somebody whose website has just stopped.
The guides are written so that you can fix it yourself, or at least ask the right person the right question. If you'd rather somebody just sorted it, that's the other half of what I do.