When your website and email suddenly stop working

This organisation came to me through a referral from a local infrastructure organisation.

They were a small community organisation and had suddenly lost both their website and their email, but they had no idea why.

Their website was hosted with TSOHOST, while their Microsoft 365 email was looked after by a local IT company. When everything stopped working, they quite correctly contacted the IT company.

The problem came when they got the reply from the IT company - it was full of terminology they didn’t understand: DNS, A records, MX records and nameservers. Not only that, but it also said that the IT company could sort the problem out for £100.

That left the organisation with two questions.

• What did any of that mean?
• And why should they pay £100 to fix something they thought was already covered because the IT company were already looking after their emails?

For a small community organisation with a limited budget, £100 mattered. They didn’t want to spend it without understanding what they were actually paying for.

Finding out what had happened

With their permission, I contacted the IT company on their behalf.

They explained that the problem wasn’t with Microsoft 365 or anything they had done. They believed it originated with TSOHOST, where the organisation’s website was hosted, so I got the organisation’s TSOHOST login details and investigated.

TSOHOST had recently moved the website to a new server, but the DNS records hadn’t been copied across as part of the move.  They had emailed the customers explaining that action was required, but the organisation had received the email and hadn’t understood what it meant or realised what would happen if they didn’t act on it.

Unfortunately, that is not at all unusual. Many small or even medium sized organisations in both the charity and commercial sectors simply don't have access to the level of IT knowledge needed to understand a technical problem such as this, nor should they. A small community organisation shouldn’t need to understand A records, MX records and nameservers simply to keep its website and email working.

But the problem is that without the correct DNS records, the internet no longer knew where to find either of them.

Sorting out the immediate problem

Once I knew what had happened, the solution became much clearer.

Rather than leaving the DNS with the website hosting company, the nameservers could be changed so that the IT company took control of it. They could then restore the necessary records and manage them alongside the organisation’s Microsoft 365 email in future.

That dealt with the technical problem.

But there was still another question to answer: Why was the organisation being asked to pay £100 when it believed this should have been covered by its support contract?

The support contract that didn’t exist

When I looked into the arrangement with the IT company, I discovered that the organisation didn’t actually have a support contract with them - the IT company was managing its Microsoft 365 email without charge because it was a charity.

They weren’t being paid to provide general IT support, manage the website or investigate problems caused by another supplier, so what they were now being asked to do was additional work. They needed to investigate the problem, take control of the DNS, configure it correctly and make sure the organisation’s services were working again.

Once I understood the position, I explained it to the organisation.

I told them what had gone wrong, what the technical terminology meant, what their actual arrangement with the IT company was and what the proposed £100 charge covered.

And my advice was simple.

Pay it. £100 was a bargain.

24 hours later, emails were back, website was back, the relationship with the IT supplier was clarified, and both sides were happy.

The lesson

When something technical goes wrong, it isn’t always obvious who is responsible for fixing it.

There may be several suppliers involved, each responsible for a different part of the service. And if you don’t know where one supplier’s responsibility ends and another begins, it can be very difficult to work out who you should be talking to, let alone whether you should be paying them.

This organisation didn’t need to learn how DNS works. It needed somebody who could investigate the problem, talk to the suppliers in their language, work out who was responsible for what, and then explain the situation in plain English.

And independent advice doesn’t always mean challenging the supplier. Sometimes it means finding out that the supplier is right.