When the client's site went down during their big launch, my phone blew up

I was at a coffee shop in Austin last March, just finishing a latte, when my client called screaming that their store was showing a 500 error. Their big product launch was live and every ad dollar they had was pointing to a dead page. I pulled up my laptop right there on the sticky table, and the first thing I checked was the hosting dashboard. Turns out their auto-renewal failed on the domain, so the whole thing just dropped. I paid the renewal fee right from my phone, but DNS took almost an hour to spread back out. In that time, they lost maybe 30% of their launch traffic, which hurt. I ended up setting up a monitoring alert and a backup payment method for them after that. Has anyone else dealt with a client whose domain lapsed at the worst possible minute, and how did you handle the blame game?

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1 Comment

lisa83921d ago

Domain renewals are your job, not the client's. You get paid to keep that stuff running. If the auto-renewal failed on your watch, that's on you. Blaming the payment method or DNS timing sounds like making excuses. I've seen tree service sites drop because the owner ignored the warning emails. But my guys check that stuff weekly. You should've had a backup card on file from day one. Monitoring alerts after the fact is too late.