Hi friends 👋🏻

I sat down at my desk this morning to a bunch of "your website is down" alerts 🚨

Not good.

Which leads to today's question. Sure the alerts are scary and throw your day off track, but would you rather:

🔲 know that your website is offline, or

🔲 remain blissfully unaware?

You can probably guess my answer. In this week's email, I'll explain what's going on today, how I was alerted quickly, and why it's important to know so you can adjust your communications activities accordingly.

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Why are some websites down today?

First, why is the Blue Hills Digital website (and a TON of other websites) offline this morning?

Because the giant internet infrastructure company Cloudflare is having another major outage.

There's nothing I can do about this. The integration with Cloudflare is upstream from the hosting provider I use, and this outage is so big it has taken down huge global websites over the past few hours. It's similar in scope to the Amazon Web Services outage that caused similar disruption last month.

Hopefully by the time you read this, the engineers at Cloudflare will have figured this out and impacted sites will be back online.

Where did my alerts come from?

I received alerts from two places. I use a reputable website hosting provider (Kinsta) that does a good job reporting quickly on any outages, so I had email alerts from them.

And I also subscribe to a monitoring service from UptimeRobot. I highly recommend setting this up yourself for your own organization's website. There's a free plan, and some paid plan levels with more frequent and sophisticated monitoring.

Here's the alert I saw this morning in the UptimeRobot app (and you can set up alerts via SMS, Slack, etc. too):

Why is it important to know when your website is offline (even if there's nothing you can do about it)?

That's right – I'd rather know than be blissfully unaware:

✅ know that your website is offline, or

🔲 remain blissfully unaware

A few reasons I'd want to know.

• Pause scheduled communications! If you know your website is offline or experiencing interruption, you can press pause on that scheduled email campaign that points your list of thousands to a landing page on your (currently unavailable) website. Same with your paid ad campaign that is launching today. Hit pause until everything is back online again.
• Field internal questions. People inside your organization will probably notice, and if you're the staff person that they come to with website questions you should have an answer ready.
• Try to preempt external questions. If an outage is taking a while to resolve, you may want to acknowledge that you're aware of the problem on your social media accounts.
• Figure out the root cause. In today's case, I know there isn't anything I personally can do to resolve the issue more quickly. But you should always act quickly to figure out why your website is offline. It might not be the failure of a tech company half the internet relies on. Instead, it might be that someone forgot to renew your domain registration 😬 In that case, you need to act fast to fix the issue.

Takeaway message: invest in a website monitoring service like UptimeRobot. There's a free plan with basic features, and paid options for just a few dollars a month that offer a check every minute, alerts across multiple communication channels, domain expiration monitoring, and much more. I recommend it!

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Hopefully the Blue Hills Digital website is back online by the time you receive this 🤞🏻

(And to my clients on this list, I've contacted you directly if your website is impacted, so if you haven't heard from me, you're good 🙂 )

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