Many hosts based in the United States run reduced support from today through the weekend. Find the emergency route now, know what is urgent, freeze site changes until Tuesday, and plan for taking orders if the site fails.

A holiday you may not notice

Today is Thanksgiving in the United States. For a business in BC it is an ordinary Thursday, and the shop opens as usual.

For many of the companies a website depends on, it is not. Plenty of hosting companies, payment processors, email services and plugin makers are American, and many run holiday staffing today and through the weekend.

That weekend is also the busiest of the year for online stores. More sites have problems, more owners open tickets, and fewer people are there to answer them.

The same pattern returns over Christmas and New Year.

What reduced support looks like

The fourth matters most when something serious breaks. A failed database or a hacked account may need an engineer who is called in only for emergencies, and only when the ticket shows it is one.

Find out today

Most hosts publish their support hours, and many announce holiday changes on a status page or in their help centre. Look now, while nothing is wrong.

Note three things: which channels stay open all weekend, how to mark a ticket as an emergency, and where outages are announced.

If none of that is published, ask in a ticket today. Asked while nothing is broken, it is an easy question; asked on Saturday night, it joins the queue.

Proving the account is yours

Support will not touch an account until the person asking proves they are allowed to. Usually that means writing from the email address on the account, or giving a support PIN or a security answer.

Find all three now. If the account is in a former designer's or employee's name, or its email goes to a mailbox nobody reads, fix that first: on a holiday weekend nobody may be able to make an exception.

Keep the details where two people in the business can reach them, not only on the owner's phone.

What counts as urgent

Urgent means the business is losing money or exposing customers right now: the site is down, checkout fails, payments are refused, order emails stop arriving, a certificate has expired, or visitors are being redirected somewhere they should not go.

Not urgent: a plugin question, a design change, a slow admin screen, a new email account. Those can wait until Tuesday.

Be honest with the priority setting. Marking routine requests as emergencies slows down everyone with a real one, and support teams soon learn whose emergencies are real.

A worked example

An online jewellery store run by a goldsmith and one assistant sells rings, pendants and earrings made in a small studio, mostly as gifts.

On the Saturday after US Thanksgiving last year, its checkout began failing after payment. Customers were charged but saw an error instead of a confirmation, and no order reached the studio.

The host's phone line was closed for the holiday. The owner opened four tickets in two hours, and support then asked for a PIN that only the original web designer had.

The cause, found on Monday, was a hosting account that had run out of disk space, so the database could no longer save orders. The fix took minutes. Reaching it took two days.

This year the account is in the business's name, the PIN is in the shared password manager, and the emergency route is written on a card beside the studio computer.

Disk space was checked on Monday, and nothing on the site changes until Tuesday.

A ticket that can be acted on

Write one ticket, not several. Duplicates scatter the details across separate threads, and each one has to be read and matched up by somebody.

Put the essentials first: the domain, what is broken, when it started, what a visitor sees and what changed beforehand. Include the exact error message and the page where it appears.

Then say what it is costing: checkout has failed since two o'clock and orders are being lost. That sentence is what earns the escalation.

Nothing changes until Tuesday

The surest way to avoid needing support this weekend is to change nothing: no plugin updates, no new extensions, no theme edits, no new scripts.

Routine updates can wait a few days. A genuinely urgent security fix is the exception, and whoever maintains the site should be watching for one.

Confirm that a recent backup exists away from the server, so a restore does not depend on the host's busiest weekend as well.

A plan for an hour offline

Decide now what the business does if the site fails and nobody can fix it for a few hours.

A short post on the business's social accounts and an update on the Google listing can say that orders are being taken by phone or email meanwhile, with a phone answered by someone who knows the prices.

Keep the number of whoever maintains the site, with their weekend hours. A web company that knows the site can often diagnose a problem before the host's queue reaches the ticket.

Beyond the host

The host is only one supplier on holiday hours. The payment processor, the service sending order confirmations, the domain registrar and the makers of paid plugins may all be the same.

Bookmark each one's status page, if it has one. When something fails, the first question is whose problem it is, and a status page often answers it in seconds.

The counter-case

Some hosting plans include support that genuinely runs every hour of the year, and some sites are looked after by a web company that deals with the host on the owner's behalf.

A brochure site with no shop can usually wait until Monday for anything short of a complete outage.

But for a store, this is the weekend when an hour offline costs most, so the route to help should be known before it is needed.

Before tonight

  1. Check your host's holiday support hours.
  2. Find the emergency ticket route.
  3. Confirm the account holder and support PIN.
  4. Bookmark the status pages of every supplier.
  5. Freeze all site changes until Tuesday.
  6. Confirm a recent backup sits off the server.
  7. Write down the plan for an outage.

Step three causes the longest delays when it is missed. A host cannot help someone it cannot verify, and on a holiday weekend there may be nobody with the authority to bend the rule.

Several sites on one account raise the stakes of a weekend like this, as covered in one hosting account for several businesses.

Frequently asked questions

Why does US Thanksgiving affect my website?

Many hosts, payment processors and email services are American and run reduced support today and through the weekend, which is also the busiest weekend for online stores.

What counts as an urgent hosting problem?

The site is down, checkout or payments fail, order emails stop, a certificate expires, or visitors are redirected elsewhere. Design changes and plugin questions can wait.

What should a support ticket include?

The domain, what is broken, when it started, what visitors see, what changed beforehand, the exact error message, and what the problem is costing the business.

Why might support refuse to help?

Because they cannot verify you. They usually need the email address on the account, a support PIN or a security answer, so find those before you need them.

Should I update plugins this weekend?

No. Freeze changes until Tuesday unless whoever maintains the site flags an urgent security fix. Routine updates can safely wait a few days.

What if the site goes down anyway?

Tell customers on social media and your Google listing how to order meanwhile, answer the phone, and call whoever maintains the site while the ticket waits.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

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