# Site Down: Matching What You See to the Cause

Source: https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-nz/site-down-triage

This is the cross-product triage tree for a site that will not load. KapsuleHost runs several products, and the fastest way to find the cause is not to guess which one is at fault, but to look closely at exactly what the browser puts on the screen. Every branch below is keyed on something you can see or test yourself in under a minute, and each one rules the others out.

Work top to bottom. The first four questions eliminate most of the tree, and the branches after them are meant to be mutually exclusive: you should land in exactly one.

## The Four Questions That Split the Whole Tree

Answer these before you change anything. Each one is a test you can run yourself, and each one removes whole categories of cause.

**1. Is it a calm page, or an error?** If a tidy page appears saying the site is paused, that is not a technical fault at all. It is a billing state, and the fix is in your account, not your code. Go straight to branch A below.

**2. Does it fail on mobile data as well as on your wifi?** Turn wifi off on your phone and load the site over the mobile network. If it loads on mobile data but not on your wifi, nothing is wrong with the site: the fault is your local network, your router, or a stale DNS cache on your machine. If it fails on both, the problem is real and your visitors have it too.

**3. Is it one page, or every page?** Try the home page, then an interior page, then a deliberately invented address such as `/this-page-does-not-exist`. Which of those three work, and what the invented one returns, is the single most informative test in this guide. Two branches below are decided by it alone.

**4. Do you see an error, or somebody else's website?** A site that will not load and a site that loads the wrong content are completely different problems. If your OLD website appears, nothing is broken: your domain is still pointed at your old host. That is branch D, and it is the most commonly misread symptom there is.

> **Note:** One test that is worth skipping: adding `?cachebust=1` to the address does not do what people think on our network. Our edge leaves the query string out of the cache key, so that address returns the same cached copy as before. To force a fresh answer, add a random PATH segment instead, as in `yourdomain.com/anything-random-here`. This is measured behaviour, not a guess, and it matters in branch H.

## Step Zero: Find Out Whether It Is Us

Before you read any further, check whether the platform is reporting a problem. Our status page is public, needs no login, and updates continuously:

[status.kapsulehost.com](https://status.kapsulehost.com)

You can also reach it from the bottom of the KPanel sidebar as **System Status**.

Do not read the headline alone. Find the ONE row that matches the product your site runs on, because the rows fail independently:

| If your site is | Watch this row |
|---|---|
| A website or WordPress site | **Web Hosting**, or **Managed WordPress** |
| Behind our CDN | **Kapsule CDN** |
| Using our nameservers | **Premium DNS** |
| Failing only on HTTPS | **SSL Certificates** |

> **Note:** An all-operational status page does not mean your site is fine. It means the shared platform is fine, which is genuinely useful: it tells you the cause is in your own account, your own configuration or your own code, and it moves you straight into the branches below. The status page reports our components, never your individual site.

For the availability of your own specific project rather than the platform, see [Uptime Monitoring](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-nz/site-uptime-monitoring). Uptime monitoring measures reachability, not correctness: a site that returns a broken page quickly still counts as up.

## A: A Calm Holding Page, Not an Error

**What you see:** the site does not error. A deliberately calm page loads, headed "This site is paused for now." It explains that the hosting is on hold, that nothing is lost, and it offers a button to sign in.

**What it means:** this is a billing state, not a technical fault. The server is healthy and is answering on purpose. No amount of clearing caches, re-pointing DNS or redeploying will change it.

**What to do:** sign in and settle the account. The site comes back within minutes of payment clearing, and your data was never touched. Start at [Why Your Account Was Suspended](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-nz/account-suspended), and for the full schedule of what happens on which day, [What Happens If You Stop Paying](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-nz/unpaid-account-timeline).

**This narrows the product too.** Only a website on a hosting subscription is ever given a holding page. So a holding page tells you which product you are dealing with as well as which kind of problem.

> **Tip:** The holding page is deliberately temporary as far as search engines are concerned, and it asks them not to index it. A short suspension does not throw away your rankings. Certificate validation is exempt from it, so renewals keep working and your HTTPS does not lapse while you sort the bill out.

**Returning to service is not instantaneous.** Paying updates your account immediately, but a background reconciler is what lifts the block on the web server, and it runs on a cycle of a few minutes. If the holding page is still there right after payment, wait a few minutes and reload in a private window before raising a ticket.

## A2: You Cannot Sign In, but the Site Is Fine

**What you see:** the opposite of branch A. Visitors get the website perfectly normally, but you cannot get into KPanel. The login page says "Your account has been suspended. Contact support."

**What it means:** this is also billing, and it is the case most people misread. Several account-level suspensions never touch the websites at all: an annual invoice you pay by hand, a suspension raised by our team, and an account billed through a reseller all lock the panel while every site carries on serving. Nothing about your site will tell you this has happened, which is exactly why it is worth naming here.

**What to do:** settling the invoice is necessary but, on these paths, is often not sufficient on its own to restore panel access. Email [support@kapsulehost.com](mailto:support@kapsulehost.com) from the account email address, say that you have paid, and ask for access to be restored. Include the invoice number.

> **Note:** If you were already signed in when a suspension was applied, your existing session keeps working until it expires. Being able to use the panel right now does not prove the account is in good standing. Check **Billing** directly rather than reading anything into still being logged in.

## C: Every Address Returns the Home Page

**What you see:** the home page loads. Interior pages also return the home page rather than their own content, and so does a deliberately invented address such as `/this-page-does-not-exist`, which answers with the home page instead of a 404.

**When it is correct:** your app is client-routed and your router simply is not matching the address. The fault is in your front end code, not the hosting.

**When it is wrong:** you are not running a client-routed framework, and a wrong address is silently answering with your home page. That is worth fixing, because a broken internal link then survives every crawl and search engines treat it badly. Check the framework preset on the project: the preset you chose wins over what we detect, so an incorrectly chosen preset produces exactly this symptom.

**The healthy behaviour for everything else:** an unknown address returns your build's own `404.html` if the build contains one, with a real 404 status, and our own 404 page if it does not.

## D: Your Old Website Appears Instead of the New One

**What you see:** something loads, and it is wrong. It is your previous website, your old host's parking page, or a "coming soon" page you do not recognise. Nothing errors.

**What it means:** your domain is still pointed at your old host. The request never reaches KapsuleHost at all, so nothing you change on our side can affect what the visitor sees. This is the most commonly misread symptom in hosting, because a working page feels like progress.

**How to confirm it in one place:**

- For a domain registered with us, open **Domains**, then the domain. The card there tells you plainly which of five things is true, including "Not pointed here", which reads: "Every resolver we checked returns nameservers that are not ours, so traffic for this domain is not reaching KapsuleHost." If it says "Propagating" instead, it names how many resolvers already agree, and it finishes on its own, usually within a few hours.

**What to do:** change the records at whoever holds the domain, then wait.

## E: The Browser Cannot Find the Domain at All

**What you see:** the browser never reaches a server. It reports that the address could not be found or that the server IP address could not be found, and it fails identically on mobile data and on wifi, in a private window, and for other people.

**What it means:** the name does not resolve for anybody. There is no record to follow, so the request is not slow or refused, it simply has nowhere to go. The usual causes are a domain that expired, a domain whose nameservers were never set, a record that was deleted, or a name that was only ever typed into our panel and never created at the registrar.

**What to do, in this order:**

1. Check the domain has not expired. Open **Domains** and look at the domain's status. An expired domain stops resolving regardless of how healthy the hosting is, and renewing it is the only fix. Our clock is not the registry's clock: see [Domain Renewal and Expiry](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-nz/domains-renewal-expiry).
2. Check delegation on the domain's card. "No answer" there means no resolver can find the domain at all, which usually means it is newly registered, expired, or has no nameservers set.

For what each record type does, see [DNS Basics](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-nz/dns-basics) and [CNAME Records](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-nz/cname-records).

## F: A Certificate Warning Instead of the Site

**What you see:** the browser blocks the page with a security warning rather than loading it, saying the connection is not private. The site itself is healthy behind that warning: this is about the certificate, not the server.

**What it means:** either no certificate has been issued for this exact hostname yet, or the one that exists has expired, or it covers a different name than the one you typed. A very common version is that `www.yourdomain.com` and `yourdomain.com` are not both covered, so one works and the other does not. Test both spellings explicitly: if one loads and the other warns, it is a certificate and record problem for that one name, not a server problem.

**For a website on hosting, do not trust the site overview screen.** The overview shows a certificate as either Active or Pending, and "Pending, certificate being issued" is what it displays for an expired or failed certificate too. That is reassuring at exactly the wrong moment. Go to the site, then **Security**, which shows the real state: how many days the certificate has left, and a **Renew now** button. That screen is the honest one and it is where you should look.

Certificate issuance needs DNS to be correct first, so if branch D or E applies, fix that before reissuing anything. See [SSL Certificates](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-nz/ssl-certificates), and for a padlock that is broken rather than missing, [Fixing Mixed Content Warnings](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-nz/ssl-mixed-content).

## G: A 5xx Error Page

**What you see:** a real HTTP error with a number in it: 500, 502, 503 or 504. The domain resolved, the certificate was accepted, and a server answered. That is a lot of the tree already eliminated.

**What it means:** the request reached us and the application behind it failed or did not answer in time. The number matters: a 500 is your application raising an error, a 502 and a 504 are about the process behind the web server being unreachable or too slow, and a 503 is a deliberate refusal, which on hosting is what a suspension looks like underneath the holding page in branch A.

**What to do:** read the number, then read your own logs. Open the site and then **Logs**, and look at the most recent entries: a PHP fatal error names the file and line, which identifies the plugin or the code responsible. Full detail per code is in [HTTP Error Codes](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-nz/http-error-codes), and the usual application-level causes are in [My Website Is Not Loading](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-nz/website-not-loading).

If this started immediately after a change you made, that change is your first suspect, and restoring is faster than debugging. See [Restoring From a Backup](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-nz/restoring-from-backup).

## H: The Site Loads but the Content Is Wrong or Old

**What you see:** the site works, but it is serving something out of date: a page you deleted, an old stylesheet, a fix you deployed an hour ago that is not showing, or a broken page that you have already repaired.

**What it means:** you are being served a cached copy from our edge rather than a fresh answer from your site. Our CDN deliberately keeps serving the last good copy when the origin behind it is unreachable, which is usually a kindness and is occasionally confusing, because it means a working-looking site can sit in front of an origin that is actually down.

**How to prove it is cache and not your site:** load a random path that cannot be cached, such as `yourdomain.com/anything-random-here`. Do not use `?cachebust=1`: our edge ignores the query string when it decides what to serve from cache, so that returns the cached copy and proves nothing. If the random path shows fresh behaviour and your real page does not, you are looking at cache. In browser developer tools, the response header `cdn-cache` says `HIT`, `MISS` or `BYPASS`, which answers the same question directly.

**What to do:** purge the cache. See [Purging the CDN Cache](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-nz/cdn-cache-purge). Purge any caching plugin and your site cache too, and then check in a private window so your own browser cache does not fool you. [Site Caching](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-nz/site-cache) covers the layers in order.

> **Note:** Bandwidth is not the cause. Our CDN bandwidth is unlimited to you: going over an expected volume never pauses your site, never removes your hostname from the edge and never silently switches you to a slower path. If your site is slow or stale, look at cache and at the site itself, not at how much traffic you have used.

## What to Send Support If You Are Still Stuck

If you have worked through this and still cannot place the fault, one good message saves a day of back and forth. Include:

- The exact address you are loading, with `https://` and with or without `www` exactly as you typed it.
- The exact error, copied as text rather than described. If it is a line starting with `{"error":`, send that line verbatim, because it names the cause.
- Which branch above you landed in, and what the panel screen said.
- Whether it fails on mobile data as well as wifi, and whether it fails for other people.
- When it started, and what changed around then.

Email [support@kapsulehost.com](mailto:support@kapsulehost.com) or open a ticket from **Support** in KPanel. See [Opening a Support Ticket](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-nz/opening-a-support-ticket).

## Related Reading

- [My Website Is Not Loading: Diagnostic Checklist](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-nz/website-not-loading)
- [HTTP Error Codes on KapsuleHost](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-nz/http-error-codes)
- [Why Your Account Was Suspended](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-nz/account-suspended)
- [SSL Certificates](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-nz/ssl-certificates)
- [Nameservers](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-nz/nameservers)
- [Status and Uptime](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-nz/status-and-uptime)