What to Do When Your SaaS Is Down (Solo Founder Checklist)
A calm, practical playbook for solo founders
If your SaaS site is down, the worst thing you can do is panic.
The second worst thing is finding out because a customer tells you.
This checklist is for solo SaaS founders asking the simple question:
"What do I do when my site goes down — and how do I make sure I'm never the last to know again?"
The real damage isn't downtime
Downtime happens.
Servers fail. Dependencies break. Deploys go wrong.
No SaaS runs forever without incidents.
What actually hurts your business is this moment:
A customer tells you your site is down.
That's when trust takes a hit.
That's when you look unprepared.
That's when people start wondering if they can rely on you.
The real failure isn't the outage.
It's being the last one to know.
The 5-step downtime response checklist
When your site is down, your job is to stay calm and move in order.
1 Acknowledge
Confirm the issue immediately.
- Check your site from an external connection
- Verify it's not just your local setup
- Assume customers are affected until proven otherwise
If it's down, it's down. Don't delay.
2 Assess
Figure out what kind of failure you're dealing with.
- Full outage or partial?
- App down or just the landing page?
- Infrastructure issue or deploy issue?
You don't need a root cause yet.
You need a working diagnosis.
3 Fix
Revert fast. Stabilize first.
- Roll back the last deploy
- Restart services if needed
- Scale or fail over if possible
Your goal is recovery, not perfection.
4 Communicate
Silence kills trust faster than downtime.
Post a short update:
- On your status page
- In your app
- By email if needed
Keep it simple:
"We're aware of the issue and actively working on it. We'll share updates shortly."
5 Prevent
After things are stable, fix the real problem:
Why did you find out late?
If a customer noticed before you did, your monitoring failed.
The real lesson every outage teaches
The goal isn't perfect uptime.
The goal is never being the last to know.
You can't prevent every incident.
But you can prevent embarrassment, panic, and slow response.
Early warning is what separates calm founders from reactive ones.
Why PingPing exists
That's exactly why PingPing exists.
Not as a dashboard.
Not as a reporting tool.
Not as a complicated monitoring suite.
PingPing is an early warning system for solo founders.
It quietly checks your site and tells you when something is wrong, before customers do.
→ Know your site is down before your customers do
Get early warning next time
You've already felt what a surprise outage is like.
You don't need more tools.
You need earlier awareness.