When "My Website Is Down" Isn't a Hosting Problem

We get the same panicked call a few times a year: "My website is down — what's going on?"

Almost every time, the site is fine. The problem is upstream, and it's something the client owns, not us.

Why this keeps happening

The usual culprits:

• A domain registration that quietly expired
• A DNS record someone changed, or never set up correctly
• An SSL certificate nobody renewed

"We had monitoring for everything we controlled. We had nothing for the things sitting in someone else's account."

Because clients control their own registrars, we have zero visibility into any of this — until something breaks and the phone rings.

We had monitoring in place for everything on our side. We had nothing for the things sitting in someone else's account.

So we built XPYR.io

A tool that watches the parts of a client's web presence we don't control, so we hear about problems before they do:

• Add clients and attach every domain they own, across any registrar
• Track domains that aren't registered yet, before they become a problem
• Get ahead of expiration, DNS issues, and SSL lapses — before anyone notices

It started as an internal tool we leaned on to avoid a few bad mornings. We rebuilt it properly, and now we're sharing it.