Our Joomla Emergency Services

If you stumbled across this article because you need emergency help for your Joomla website, then please contact us at our emergency number which is 514 961 2804 (for US callers) or +1 514 961 2804 (for international callers).

Update January 2018: Please note that the Joomla emergency service is now strictly available for enterprise clients.

We pride ourselves by offering a 24/7/365 emergency hotline for our customers as well as anyone who’s having a serious problem on his Joomla website. That’s why our customers love us, because we’re happy when their websites are up and running at all times, and if there is a critical problem on their websites, we jump and fix it when they call us, even if it’s 3 AM on the east coast, on a Sunday, which happens to also be New Year’s eve.

In this article, we would like to explain what is considered to be an emergency service, what are the typical situations that people contact us for emergency, what we do to fix their problems, and how long does it take us to get their website up and running.

What do we consider as an emergency service?

For a situation to be considered as an emergency it needs to fulfill the following 2 criteria:

– The website needs to be fixed immediately.
– The call about the website is made between 6 PM EST and 8 AM EST.

So, if you call us at 2 PM Pacific Time (which is 5 PM Eastern Time), and even if it’s an emergency, we will charge you the normal fees. If you call us at 11:30 PM EST and you need to fix your website immediately, then we consider this as an emergency, and we’ll charge you double the normal rate.

What are the most common reasons people call us for our emergency services?

Here’s a list of the common reasons that people call us for:

• Their website is completely down: The website does not open at all (either it shows a blank page or displays a PHP error). In our experience (and in the case of Joomla), this is due to one of the following:
  • They activated an extension (usually a plugin) that broke their website.
  • They mistakenly altered the configuration.php file of their Joomla website.
  • They wrongly modified the .htaccess file of their website.
• Their website is hacked: This is usually due to an out-of-date Joomla installation, a weak extension, or some “loose” permissions on the Joomla’s core and/or template files. (Check this list of potential reasons on why a Joomla website is hacked).
• Some of their important extensions are not working: This happens because of changes they did to these extension through the admin area, that are, unfortunately, irreversible from the admin section (one has to go to the database to revert the changes).
• Their website is suddenly extremely slow (e.g. is not responding): We have investigated before the reasons on why a Joomla website becomes slow and what you can do to make it faster, but if this slowness happens all of a sudden, then it could be that there is a newly installed extension (that is inefficient) that is draining all the resources of the database.
• Their website is not functioning properly: For example, links are not working (this is a sign of an SEF and/or .htaccess problem), modules are not appearing, uploads not working, images not displaying, errors are displayed in some places, etc…

As you can see from the above, there are many reasons for a Joomla website to need emergency intervention. Now the question is, what do we do?

How do we get the website up and running?

Well, the answer of course, depends on the situation. For example, in the case of an .htaccess problem, we might revert back the file to its original version (depending, of course, on the Joomla version that our client is running). The most important thing for us is to get the website up and running, as soon as possible. We take our clients’ businesses very seriously, and we never ever said to a customer “we can’t do it” or “we can’t fix your website” or “it’s just too hard for us” or “we’re sorry, but you should’ve been more careful”. We always fix the website, and again, we try our best to fix it in record speed.

How much time does it takes to fix the website?

Well, when we work under stress, we burn ourselves and work nearly at double speed (that’s why we charge the double rate), because we know that every second counts. Typically, it takes us anything between 15 minutes to 2 hours to get a broken/hacked website up and running. Note that sometimes our customers elect to get the basic functionality of their website up and running, and ask us to fix the rest of the website during normal working hours so that they will incur less fees.