Website is down or returning 500/503 errors after recent changes.

Resolution Steps

1. 1Confirm the site is actually down by checking it from a different network or using downforeveryoneorjustme.com.
2. 2Check the GoDaddy System Status page for any active hosting outages affecting the customer's data center.
3. 3Ask the customer what changed before the site went down — plugin updates, theme changes, file uploads.
4. 4Access cPanel and check the Error Logs (under Metrics) for the most recent error entries.
5. 5Verify disk quota is not exceeded — a full disk causes 500 errors immediately.
6. 6Check if .htaccess file was recently modified; a syntax error here takes down the entire site.
7. 7Confirm PHP version compatibility if a plugin or theme was recently updated.
8. 8Restart PHP-FPM or the web server process from cPanel if available on the hosting plan.
9. 9If WordPress: disable all plugins via FTP by renaming the plugins folder, then re-enable one by one.

"I'm sorry your site is down — I know how urgent that is. Let's get this resolved as quickly as possible. First, I'm checking our system status to make sure there's no active outage on our end... [check status]. Good — your data center is showing all clear, so this is specific to your account. Can you tell me if anything changed on your site in the last 24 hours? A plugin update, a theme change, or any file uploads? That's usually the fastest way to pinpoint the cause. [based on answer, walk through steps] Here's what I'd like to do: I'm going to walk you through checking your error logs in cPanel — it takes about 2 minutes and will tell us exactly what's causing the issue. Are you able to log in to cPanel right now?"

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