Website Hosting Checklist

For most organizations websites are a critical piece of communication and need to be accessible at all time. What should you do if your website is offline?

You come into work one day and find that your website is down. Do you know what to do, or who to call?

For most organizations today, your website is a critical piece of communication and needs to always be accessible; when this isn’t the case you need to be able to act quickly to notify those who can help restore the site to normal. Here are some suggestions so you can be ready.

If Dunham hosts your website:

• Call us right away: 905-312-8444 ext 102
• If it’s on a weekend or after hours, send an email to emergency@thedunhamgroup.com
• We’ll take care of everything from that point on

If your site is hosted by another provider and Dunham maintains the site:

• Call us right away: 905-312-8444 ext 102
• Outside of business hours, contact your hosting provider

Being Prepared

Here’s a list of information about your site that you should keep in one place and be able to quickly access:

• CPanel or web hosting control panel access information. This would include address, username and password. Keep this information up-to-date. If Dunham hosts your site, we keep this for you.
• FTP information. Like control panel access, this includes FTP address, username and password. If Dunham hosts your site, we keep this for you.
• If your site is content managed, keep a list of users, along with their passwords – if you know them.
• DNS hosting information. The Domain Name System is a central part of the Internet. It’s a registry that matches domain names (www.google.com) with IP addresses (the Internet Protocol, which is a set of numbers). The information for your website is stored, or hosted, on the Internet; it could be by the same company that hosts your website, or it could be where you registered your domain. Wherever it is hosted, you’ll want to store the address, username and password for the account. If Dunham hosts your DNS, we keep this for you.
• Domain registration information. Your website name or domain is registered somewhere and will need to be renewed periodically. To renew it you’ll need to keep the address, username and password. Since it can be years between renewals, it’s often the case that the credit card has changed or expired. If Dunham registered your domain, we manage this for you.

Keeping this information in one place is important because – though you may rarely need it – not having it can lead to your website going down, or loosing your domain.

If you can’t locate this information, call us and we’ll help you put it together.