Your site is down. Start here.
Emergency website recovery restores a site that is down, hacked or lost, usually within hours. Haryes diagnoses the cause, restores from the cleanest available backup or rebuilds critical pages, and gives you a plan so it does not recur.
In an emergency, the wrong first move makes it worse.
A site goes down and the instinct is to start changing things: reinstall, restore something, delete files, call whoever built it two years ago. Each of those can destroy the evidence needed to work out what happened.
Before anything else, do these three things.
- Do not delete anything, including files that look suspicious. They are evidence.
- Do not restore a backup over the top before anyone has looked at the current state.
- Do not change hosting mid-incident, which usually loses the logs that explain it.
How recovery runs
Triage, restore, explain, prevent.
Triage
What is actually wrong: hosting, domain, certificate, code, database or compromise. They look identical from the outside and need opposite responses.
The right problem identified.
Preserve
A forensic copy of the current state before anything is changed, so the cause can still be established afterwards.
Evidence kept.
Restore service
From the cleanest available backup, or by rebuilding the critical pages first if no good backup exists.
Customers can reach you.
Explain
A written account of what happened and why, once service is stable. Not a guess offered during the incident.
An answer you can act on.
Prevent
Backups, monitoring and the specific fix for whatever caused this, so the next one does not happen the same way.
A plan, not a promise.
The four emergencies we see most
Each one needs a different first move, which is why diagnosis comes before action.
Hacked
Spam content, browser warnings or a blacklist entry. Needs containment before restoration.
Preserve, then clean.
Down
Hosting failure, an expired certificate, a lapsed domain or a bad deployment. Often the fastest to fix.
Check the boring causes first.
Lost
A developer is gone, the hosting is unreachable, or the account is in someone else's name.
Recover access first.
Broken
An update or change took the site down and there is no staging copy to compare against.
Roll back, then diagnose.
What you get
Charged at KES 6,500 an hour for emergency work, with an estimate before we start wherever the situation allows one.
Service restored
As fast as the situation allows.
- Cleanest available backup, verified
- Critical pages rebuilt if no backup exists
- A holding page while we work, if you want one
A written explanation
What happened, in plain language.
- Cause identified where the evidence allows
- What was affected
- What we changed
A prevention plan
So this is the last time.
- Backups set up properly
- Monitoring in place
- The specific cause closed
Access in your name
Often the real problem.
- Hosting and domain recovered to you
- Credentials rotated
- A copy of everything handed over
Questions clients ask before they commit
How fast can you respond?
We treat site-down and compromise as emergencies and respond as quickly as we can the same working day. We will not promise a response time we cannot keep, so tell us what is happening and we will tell you when we can start.
We have no backup. Is the site gone?
Often not. Hosting providers keep their own backups, search engine caches hold content, and the critical pages can be rebuilt quickly. It is worse than having a backup and it is rarely total.
Our developer has disappeared. Can you help?
Yes, and it is common. The first job is recovering access to the domain and hosting in your business name, which is sometimes most of the work.
What does emergency work cost?
KES 6,500 an hour, with an estimate up front wherever the situation allows one. If it turns out to be a ten-minute fix, that is what you pay for.
What is happening right now?
The site is unreachable or showing warnings.
Do not change anything. Send us what you know and we will triage it.
Get emergency helpIt is back up and you do not know why it went down.
Worth finding out, because it will happen again otherwise.
See maintenance plansIn an incident, the most expensive mistakes are made in the first hour by people trying to help.
