Site down, errors everywhere, or editors locked out? A senior Umbraco specialist who answers fast, diagnoses honestly and fixes the actual problem.
Something is wrong with the website. Maybe it is fully down and the homepage is an error screen with your logo nowhere in sight. Maybe it is subtler and worse: checkout intermittently failing, the backoffice refusing logins, pages taking eleven seconds, a deploy that half-worked. Someone senior is asking for an update every hour, and the honest current update is that nobody in the building knows what is happening.
The old way looks like this: raise a ticket with the host, who says the server is fine. Message the old agency, who quote next month. Post in a forum. Try turning it off and on again, which works just often enough to be dangerous. Meanwhile the site stays broken, and every hour writes its cost somewhere: lost orders, lost applications, lost confidence.
The alternative is one message to a specialist who has been debugging Umbraco sites since 2011, treats a broken production site as the day's first priority, and tells you the truth about what he finds.
Say what broke, when, and what changed just before. Tell me it is urgent and I treat it that way; broken production sites do not wait their turn in a queue.
Logs, recent deploys, hosting state and the database tell the real story. Fourteen years of Umbraco failures means most symptoms point somewhere I have already been.
First get the site serving visitors again, even if that is a workaround. Then fix the underlying cause properly so the same failure cannot repeat next month.
A plain-English account of the cause, the fix and what would stop it happening again. You decide what to do with that; there is no manufactured upsell.
Rarely because the fault is exotic. They stay broken because responsibility is split three ways: the host owns the server, an agency owns the code, an IT team owns the network, and a production incident falls precisely into the gaps between them. Each party runs its own checks, declares its own patch healthy and closes the ticket. The site, which lives across all three domains at once, stays down while everyone is technically correct.
A specialist collapses the gaps. I read application logs, server configuration and database behaviour as one system, because after 200 plus Umbraco sites the boundaries between those layers are where I expect trouble to hide. The intermittent failures, the ones that vanish whenever someone official is watching, are almost always boundary problems, and they are the ones I am most often called about.
Sometimes the diagnosis is bigger than the symptom. A site limping on an ancient Umbraco version with years of unpatched packages can be stabilised, and I will stabilise it, but you deserve to hear that you are paying for firefighting in a wooden building. When that is the case I will lay out the options, whether that is an upgrade, a support plan with patching inside 48 hours, or rehoming the site on managed hosting where someone is finally accountable for the whole stack. What I will not do is invent drama to sell a rebuild; most broken sites need a fix, not a funeral.
Emergency work is charged at the same flat £500 a day as everything else on the pricing page. No urgency multiplier, because charging people extra for having a bad day is a strange way to start a relationship. Many fixes take a day or less, and if yours looks like more I will say so before the meter runs.
Gather what you can, error messages, timings, what changed recently, and send it through the contact page marked urgent. If you cannot gather anything, send the message anyway. Ongoing support and maintenance exists precisely so there is never a next time, but today the only job is getting you back up.
Tell me what you're working on and I'll come back within one working day.
A specialist Umbraco developer offering freelance / contract services to a wide variety of clients across the UK
Maesgwyn, 3 Claremont rd,
Llandudno, North Wales, LL30 2UF