Servers Are Down: What To Do When Your Website Goes Offline
Aug 12, 2026 · 17 min read · exact
Nothing disrupts your day quite like discovering your website is offline. Whether you run a small online store, manage client sites as a reseller, or depend on email for daily operations, a server outage demands fast answers. This guide walks you through how to verify if eXact Digital servers are down, what causes outages, and exactly what to do while you wait for resolution.
Quick Answer: Are the servers down right now?
If you landed here wondering whether eXact Digital (exact.gg) systems are currently affected, this section gives you the short version before we get into details.
As of August 12, 2026, at 06:02 CST, all eXact Digital core hosting systems are operating normally. There are no active outages, no degraded performance incidents, and no scheduled maintenance windows currently impacting shared hosting, VPS, reseller hosting, or email platforms.
For live data that auto-refreshes every few minutes, visit the eXact Digital status page at status.exact.gg. That page is your single source of truth and will always reflect the most current service health, even if the main site is temporarily unreachable.
Here is what you can quickly confirm there:
Whether any active incident is being investigated or has been identified
If any service components (hosting, DNS, cPanel, email) are experiencing issues
Whether any upcoming maintenance window has been announced with UTC times
We are committed to transparency and fast communication whenever servers are down. If something changes, you will see it on the status page within minutes.
How to check if it's down for everyone or just me
Before you assume the worst, it helps to understand the difference between a global outage and a local connectivity problem. A global outage means the servers themselves are offline and everyone is affected. A "just me" issue means something between your device and the server is broken, such as your home router, your ISP, or your DNS cache.
Here is a simple flow to confirm the scope of an outage using external monitoring tools:
Check the eXact Digital status page first. If every component shows green and "All Systems Operational," the servers are likely fine.
Use an independent website checker. Tools like OnlineOrNot let you check server status by entering the hostname or URL. OnlineOrNot checks from 15 locations worldwide and shows response times and HTTP status codes, so you can confirm whether the scope of the issue is global or regional.
Try from a different network. Load your site on mobile data instead of home Wi-Fi. If it works on one but not the other, your ISP or router is the likely culprit.
Open an incognito or private browser window. This rules out cached pages, expired cookies, or browser extensions causing errors. Try loading a known reliable site like exact.gg to verify your connection works at all.
If both third-party checkers and the eXact Digital status page show green, the problem is almost certainly local to your device or network. The issue is not with the servers.
How to confirm if eXact Digital servers are down
eXact Digital provides multiple ways to verify service health when you suspect servers are down.
The official status page on status.exact.gg is the primary source of truth, updated in real time by the Operations team. It is hosted on separate infrastructure from the main hosting platform, which means it stays accessible even during a major outage affecting user sites.
Here is what you will find on the page and how to read it:
Overall platform indicator. A banner at the top showing either "All Systems Operational," "Partial Outage," "Major Outage," or "Undergoing Maintenance."
Per-service component indicators. Individual status for shared hosting, VPS, reseller hosting, DNS, email, and cPanel. If only one component is red, the rest of your services may still function normally.
Incident and maintenance feed. A chronological timeline of current and past events, each with timestamps and progress updates.
Subscription options. You can subscribe via email or RSS directly from the status page to receive proactive notifications about any service disruptions.
When an issue is active, you will see messages following a standard lifecycle: "Investigating" means the team is aware of the issue but the root cause is unknown; "Identified" means the cause has been found and a fix is underway; "Monitoring" means a fix is deployed and engineers are watching for stability; and "Resolved" means service has been fully restored.
Aggregation platforms like StatusGator, which monitors over 10,070 cloud services and websites, can also help you track outages across multiple providers if you use more than one hosting company.
Common reasons servers go down (and what they look like to you)
Not every "site is down" experience looks the same from your end. Understanding the cause helps set your expectations for how long resolution might take.
Here are the most common outage categories:
Scheduled maintenance. Pre-announced work on infrastructure. You might see brief control panel unavailability or slower load times. The status page will show "undergoing maintenance" with a defined window.
Hardware failure. Server downtime occurs due to hardware failure or software bugs. A failed disk, power supply, or memory module can take a node offline. Symptoms include HTTP status codes like 500 (indicating server errors during outages), 503 errors, or a completely unreachable site. A server may be down if it returns 5xx errors repeatedly.
Network outages. Loss of connectivity can result from severed fiber-optic lines or DNS errors. Your site may time out or only be reachable from certain regions. For example, on August 10, 2026, a hypothetical fiber cut at a single data center could leave shared hosting customers in that facility seeing timeouts for 12 minutes while other data centers remain unaffected.
DDoS or security events. Distributed Denial of Service attacks can overwhelm server resources, causing slowdowns, timeouts, or firewall-triggered blocks. Cyberattacks like DDoS can significantly disrupt server operations even on well-protected infrastructure.
Software bugs or misconfigurations. Critical system misconfigurations can lead to unavailability. A bad configuration push, a failed update, or accidental deletion of system files can all bring services down. Running out of disk space can cause resource exhaustion and downtime as well. You might see partial page loads, database connection errors, or degraded performance issues.
eXact Digital's AMD EPYC servers and NVMe SSD storage reduce many hardware-related failure modes through better thermal management, faster I/O, and lower latency. But no hardware eliminates the need for maintenance entirely, and physical events like power or network disruptions can still occur.
Understanding scheduled maintenance vs unexpected outages
Not all downtime is created equal. Scheduled maintenance is planned, announced in advance, and essential for long-term reliability. Unexpected outages are unplanned events that require real time status updates and rapid response.
Scheduled maintenance looks like this:
A maintenance window is announced ahead of time on the status page and via email. For example: "Aug 16, 2026, 00:00–04:00 UTC for cPanel cluster upgrades."
Users can expect short service interruptions, slightly slower performance, or brief control panel unavailability during the period.
Server outages can occur due to scheduled maintenance, but these are controlled and time-limited. Emergency maintenance can also lead to temporary server inaccessibility when urgent patches (like kernel security fixes) must be applied outside the regular schedule.
eXact Digital schedules maintenance during historically low-traffic periods based on customer usage patterns across regions, including users in India and other high-traffic geographies.
Unexpected outages look different:
There is no advance notice. The status page will shift from "Operational" to "Investigating" as soon as the team becomes aware.
Updates are time-stamped and provided at regular intervals, typically every 15 to 30 minutes during a major incident. We provide updates even when there is no new information, so customers know we are actively working on the problem.
Communication focuses on what is known, what is being done, and an estimated resolution timeline once the cause has been identified.
We apologize for any inconvenience caused during both planned and unplanned events. Your patience during these windows helps our team deliver a more stable platform long term.
Step-by-step checklist when your eXact Digital site is down
This is a practical action list you can follow the moment you suspect something is wrong. Keep it bookmarked.
Check the status page. Visit status.exact.gg to see if there is an active incident or maintenance event affecting your hosting type.
Check your email. Look for notifications from eXact Digital about incidents or scheduled maintenance that might explain the disruption.
Try an incognito or private browser window. This eliminates cached data, extensions, and stale sessions as possible causes.
Test another website. Load a known site to confirm your internet connection is working.
Switch networks or devices. Try mobile data instead of Wi-Fi, or use a different computer. This helps identify whether the issue is local.
Reboot your router. Power cycle your modem and router if other sites are also failing.
Verify your domain status and DNS. Confirm your domain registration has not expired and that DNS records still point to eXact Digital. Changes to name servers can take 24 to 48 hours to propagate.
Check system logs. If you have VPS or dedicated access, check system logs to identify specific error codes during outages. This can save significant time when speaking with support.
Record exact error messages and timestamps. Note what you see (e.g., "503 Service Unavailable at 14:32 CST") before contacting support. This speeds up diagnosis considerably.
Contact support. If none of the above steps resolved the issue, reach out via live chat or ticket with the details you have gathered.
Is the problem with your server, your DNS, or your network?
Not all "servers are down" situations are actually server failures. DNS misconfigurations and network problems frequently produce identical symptoms from a user's perspective, and distinguishing between them saves you time.
Here is how to narrow it down:
If the status page is green but your site is unreachable, suspect DNS or your local network. Server outages may result from DNS failures or routing issues that are entirely outside the hosting server itself.
If your domain fails but the server IP loads correctly in a browser, the problem is DNS. This is common after a migration from providers like InMotion Hosting (which had 55 outage reports in the last 24 hours according to recent monitoring data) or other hosts, where DNS propagation delays can leave your domain temporarily offline.
If multiple customers report issues and the status page shows a partial outage, the problem is on the server or network side and the team is already investigating.
If you cannot reach any website at all, suspect your ISP or local network. Try restarting your router or switching to mobile data.
From our monitoring perspective, "experiencing issues" means we are detecting elevated error rates, slower response time, or partial regional unavailability. Degraded performance issues can cause what feels like a full outage to a few customers even though the underlying server is technically online but overloaded.
When in doubt, use a browser-based check rather than command-line tools. Simply trying to load your site from a different device or asking a colleague in another city to try is often the quickest way to identify the scope.
Real-time monitoring and how eXact Digital prevents long outages
Preventing long outages starts with detecting problems before most users even notice. eXact Digital runs a proactive monitoring stack that continuously checks HTTP endpoints, DNS resolution, database connectivity, and email delivery from multiple geographic regions in real time.
Set up automated monitoring to track system health and trigger alerts is not just advice we give customers. It is how our own infrastructure operates. When any metric crosses a threshold, alerts escalate to on-call engineers 24/7. Our team can often mitigate issues before they appear on the status page as customer-facing incidents.
Here is what the infrastructure looks like at a high level:
Clustered web nodes so that a single server failure does not take down all user sites on a platform.
Load balancing distributes incoming traffic across multiple servers, reducing downtime risks from any single node being overloaded.
RAID and NVMe SSD storage provides redundancy at the disk level. Using redundancy such as RAID configurations helps prevent system downtime from individual drive failures.
Off-server daily backups ensure that even in a worst-case scenario, data loss is limited to a maximum of 24 hours.
Out-of-band management tools allow engineers to access and troubleshoot servers even if the operating system is unresponsive, significantly reducing resolution time for hardware-level failures.
Our shared hosting platform maintained 99.97% uptime in Q2 2026. While no provider in the world can guarantee 100% availability, our goal is to keep outages rare and short. According to the Uptime Institute, power failures alone account for about 36% of major global public service outages, which is why our data centers use redundant power systems and multiple ISP connections.
How outages affect shared, VPS, and reseller hosting differently
When servers are down, the impact depends heavily on which hosting product you use.
Shared hosting places many customers on a single server or cluster. A node failure can affect many sites simultaneously, but failover and migration to healthy nodes are highly automated. The trade-off is that during peak events, a few customers may notice degraded performance even if the server is technically online.
VPS hosting offers more isolation. If your virtual machine crashes, that failure is typically confined to your instance. If the underlying host node fails, your VM may need to be migrated or rebooted, but other VPS clients on different nodes remain unaffected. VPS users often have more control, including the ability to restart services, review logs, and adjust configurations independently.
Reseller hosting carries a unique challenge: a single reseller account may host dozens of client websites. When that account's node has an issue, all of those end-customer sites go offline simultaneously. This makes timely communication and sharing status page links especially important for resellers managing their own clients.
In every case, eXact Digital's support team can quickly identify whether a problem is account-specific or node-wide, and incident updates will clearly state the affected services and scope.
What eXact Digital does during and after an outage
Here is the internal lifecycle of an incident from our side:
Detection. Automated monitoring flags anomalies. Real time updates flow to the operations dashboard.
Triage. Engineers assess scope, affected systems, and severity within minutes.
Mitigation. The team works to fix the root cause. This may involve rerouting traffic, shifting workloads between servers, applying patches, or in rare cases changing IP addresses, which could require customers using external name servers to update DNS records.
Communication. The status page is updated with time-stamped entries (e.g., "06:02 CST – Incident Resolved"). For major events, email alerts are sent to subscribed customers.
Post-incident review. Regular incident reviews help identify root causes and improve reliability. The team documents what happened, the timeline, and what changes will prevent recurrence.
Here is a concrete example: On July 31, 2026, an unplanned outage lasted 45 minutes due to a failover configuration error on the backup database cluster. The incident affected the control panel and email for certain regions. Root cause: a misconfigured failover script. The fix was completed within the hour, the script was corrected, procedures were updated, and additional monitoring was added to detect similar misconfigurations in the future.
This kind of transparency is a priority for our company. We report what went wrong, how we resolved it, and what we changed to ensure it does not happen again.
How to talk to your customers when your site is down
Many eXact Digital customers run their own business and need to address their own users when downtime occurs. Here is how to handle that communication without making things worse.
Prepare a simple status message template in advance. Something like: "We are currently experiencing a temporary service disruption. Our hosting provider has identified the issue and is actively working on a fix. We expect service to be restored within [timeframe]. Thank you for your patience."
Use every available channel. If your website is offline, post updates on social media, send a brief email newsletter, and update customer support auto-replies to mention the known incident.
Be honest, not overly technical. Phrasing like "Our hosting provider is currently experiencing issues in one of their data centers" is clear and trustworthy. Avoid jargon your customers will not understand.
Link to the eXact Digital status page when relevant, so your customers can see real time updates for themselves.
Reassure customers about their data. Remind them that backups are maintained daily and that security has not been compromised unless otherwise stated.
Respond to comments and questions quickly. Even a brief "We are aware and working on it" is better than silence.
When to contact eXact Digital support (and what to include)
Contacting support is most effective after you have checked the status page and completed basic local troubleshooting. If the issue persists and is not explained by a known incident, here is what to include in your report:
Your domain name and the exact URL that is failing
Your hosting plan type (shared, VPS, or reseller)
The approximate time the issue started
Exact error messages or HTTP status codes you are seeing
Any recent changes you made: DNS updates, plugin installations, code deploys, or a migration from another provider
Priority levels matter. Complete downtime for a production eCommerce site or total email disruption will be treated as higher priority than a cosmetic issue or slow page load. Setting clear expectations about severity helps our team triage your ticket faster.
Available support channels:
Live chat for real-time assistance
Support tickets for detailed, non-urgent issues
Phone support for critical incidents
Typical response windows are sub-15 minutes for critical incidents. If you are in the middle of migrating from another provider, do not make risky DNS changes during an active outage without guidance from support. A wrong move during a live incident can extend your downtime significantly.
Reducing future impact: backups, redundancy, and multi-region strategy
Outages cannot be eliminated entirely, but preparation drastically reduces their business impact.
Automated daily backups are included with eXact Digital hosting plans. For critical changes like major site updates or a bot migration, consider triggering an on-demand snapshot before you begin.
Maintain offsite backups to enable rapid recovery from outages. Keep a local or third-party copy of your database and key files so you are never fully dependent on a single provider.
Building redundancy can prevent single points of failure in server architecture. For mission-critical workloads, consider a multi-region setup or a secondary failover site hosted on a separate eXact Digital server in another data center.
Use a CDN to cache and serve static assets from edge locations around the world, reducing load on your origin server and providing some resilience during regional disruptions.
Implement staging environments to test changes before going live. This prevents a bad code deploy or configuration change from taking down your production site.
Test your restores periodically. A backup you have never tested is not a backup you can trust.
Here is a practical example: A small online store runs its primary VPS in one region and maintains a lightweight backup VPS in another. During a major outage in the primary region, the backup VPS serves a simple "We are temporarily offline - here is how to reach us" page with contact information and expected resolution times. Total cost for this peace of mind is a few dollars per month on a free-tier or low-cost plan.
Summary: Key actions when you think servers are down
When you suspect servers are down, here is what matters most:
Check the eXact Digital status page first. It is the fastest way to confirm whether there is an active incident, a partial outage, or scheduled maintenance affecting your services.
Rule out "just me" issues. Use an independent checker, switch networks, and try a different device before assuming a server problem.
Follow the troubleshooting checklist. Verify your domain, clear your cache, check your email for notifications, and record error details.
Contact support with clear information. Include your domain, plan type, error messages, and timestamps so the team can identify and fix the problem quickly.
Prepare for the future. Maintain offsite backups, use a CDN, test staging environments, and consider redundancy for critical workloads.
Most disruptions are resolved in minutes, not hours, thanks to real time monitoring, redundant infrastructure, and a well-practiced incident process. Scheduled maintenance is always announced in advance, and unexpected issues are communicated through the status page with regular updates until resolution.
eXact Digital's infrastructure, including NVMe SSDs, AMD EPYC servers, daily backups, and enterprise-grade security, is designed to minimize both the frequency and impact of downtime. Bookmark status.exact.gg, sign up for email notifications, and keep this checklist handy so you are never caught off guard.