Hosting and Domain Support | AldoMedia Hosting

How to get help fastest

Three routes, and the one you pick changes how quickly this ends.

Call for anything urgent

Website down, email not arriving, a domain close to expiring. A live outage is a conversation, not a thread. Ring 716-771-2536.

Use the form for anything detailed

Anything with a list in it: several mailboxes, a set of DNS records, a plan change, a quote. Writing it down gets it right first time. Send the details through the contact form.

Sign in for billing and renewals

Invoices, the card on file, auto-renew and product management live in your own account rather than with us.

Customer Login

We are honest about what this is. AldoMedia is a working web company in Buffalo, not a 24-hour help desk, and we would rather say so than publish a promise we cannot keep. The platforms behind the products run their own support behind us.

What to have ready before you call

The first five minutes of most support calls go on working out what we are looking at. Having these to hand skips that.

An open wooden wall cabinet holding a hand saw, brace drill, hatchet, chisel, files and pincers, with a typed metal list on the door. — A tool cupboard kept in order, the same habit behind support that fixes things fast.Kecko from Eastern Switzerland, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped.

The domain name involved, spelled as it is registered, including the ending.
Where things live, if you know: who the domain is registered with, who hosts the site, who runs the email. Three different companies is normal, and is often the reason for the call.
What changed and when. A site went live, a password was reset, a plan changed, a renewal came round, a plugin updated. Problems rarely arrive out of nowhere.
The exact wording you see. "Server not found", "this site can't be reached" and "your connection is not private" are three different faults with three different fixes. Take a photo of the screen.
Who else has access. Somebody having made a change is a more common explanation than anything breaking on its own.

If you do not know the answers, say so. Plenty of calls start with "somebody set this up years ago and we have no idea", which is a workable place to begin. Most of it can be read from the public record.

What we handle and what lives in your account

Your setup sits in two places: your own account at the storefront, where the products, billing and settings live, and us, where the working out happens.

Where each part of your setup is managed
The task	Where it is done	What AldoMedia does
Registering, renewing or transferring a domain	Your account	Set it up, check the registration is in the business's name, chase a transfer that stalls.
DNS records, meaning where the domain points	Your account, under the domain	Work out which record is wrong and what it should say.
Buying or changing a hosting plan	Your account	Say which plan the site needs, including when the cheaper one is fine.
Invoices, the card on file, auto-renew	Your account	Point you at the right screen. Billing is yours to change.
Creating mailboxes and resetting mailbox passwords	Your account	Plan who needs a mailbox, and move existing mail across intact.
Issuing and installing an SSL certificate	Your account, then the hosting side	Install it and confirm every page loads over HTTPS with no warning left behind.
The website itself: pages, images, plugins, code	Wherever the site is built	This is web design work. We do it, and it is quoted before it starts.
Malware cleanup and restoring a backup	Whichever security product is on the account	Run the cleanup or the restore, then tell you how it got in.

Five problems, and what to check first

These are the calls we actually get. The first checks take a few minutes and often end the problem there. If they do not, you arrive at the call knowing which part is broken.

1. The website will not load

Find out first whether it is broken for everyone or only for you. Open it on a phone with wifi switched off. If it loads on mobile data, the site is fine and your own network or a cached DNS entry is the problem.

If it is down for everyone, the wording matters. "Server not found" points at the domain or its DNS. An internal server error points at the site's own code or a plugin. A blank white page usually means the site software failed rather than the server. Check the domain is still current too, because an expired domain takes the website and the email down together. The web hosting page covers the space the site lives in.

2. Email has stopped arriving

Send a test message from a completely different provider. If it bounces, keep the bounce wording, because it names the reason. If it vanishes silently, check the junk folder, then whether a forwarding rule or a filter is quietly moving it, then whether the mailbox is full.

If your mail sends fine but customers say it never arrives, that is a different problem: the records that tell other mail systems your messages are genuine are missing or wrong. It is fixable and worth a call. More on mailboxes is on the business email page.

3. The domain expired

Move quickly, because recovery gets harder as time passes. Straight after expiry there is normally a window where a plain renewal still works. After that the name goes into a redemption period, where getting it back costs considerably more, and eventually it is released for anyone to register.

Do not register a similar name as a workaround while you decide. Recover the original first: your printed material, your email and your search results are all attached to it. Then fix the two usual causes, an expired card and renewal notices going to a mailbox nobody reads. The sequence is set out on the domain names page.

4. The browser shows a certificate warning

Read the warning rather than clicking through it. Expired means the certificate needs renewing or reinstalling. A name mismatch means it covers a different version of the address, usually the www version against the plain one. If the page loads but the padlock is missing, an image, font or script is still loading insecurely.

A warning that appears overnight with nothing else changed is nearly always a renewal that did not install, and it is a quick fix once somebody looks. The SSL certificates page explains what a certificate does and, just as usefully, what it does not.

5. You cannot log in

Work out which login you are actually at. There are usually four, and they are not the same password: the storefront account where products and billing live, the hosting control panel, the website's own admin area, and the mailbox. Trying one password on another is a common way to conclude an account is broken when it is not.

For the storefront account, use the reset link on the login screen, having checked that the reset goes somewhere you can read. If the account is registered to a former employee or a designer you have lost touch with, no reset helps, because the recovery goes to them. That is an ownership problem rather than a password problem, and one to bring to us. Either way, never read a password out or type it into a form. We will not ask you for one.

Customer Login Describe the problem

What happens after you get in touch

You tell us what broke and when

In your own words. Guessing at the terminology sends everyone the wrong way for ten minutes.
We check what is visible from outside

Whether the domain is current, where it points, whether the server answers, whether the certificate is valid, whether mail is accepted. Most faults show up before anybody logs in anywhere.
We tell you where the problem actually is

Domain, hosting, mail, certificate or the site's own code. We say so even when it sits with another company and there is nothing for us to sell you.
We fix our part, or tell you exactly what to ask for

If it belongs to another provider, you get the specific request to make rather than a suggestion to contact them. That is the difference between a five minute call and a fortnight of tickets.
We tell you how to stop it happening again

Usually something dull: auto-renew on, a contact address somebody reads, a second person with account access, a tested backup.

Moving from another provider

Migrations generate more support calls than anything else, almost always for the same reason: the order of operations.

Keep the old service running until the new one is proven. Cancelling first to save a month is how sites and mailboxes get lost.
Copy the site across and test it at a temporary address before anything is pointed anywhere.
Move the mail before you move the mail records. Existing messages go into the new mailboxes first. The switch is the last step.
Treat the domain transfer separately from the DNS change. The domains page covers what a transfer involves.
Expect a lag. DNS changes take time to reach everyone, so for a while some people see the old service and some the new. That is normal.

If you would rather not run that sequence, tell us what is moving and from where.

The mistakes that turn a small problem into an expensive one

Changing DNS to see if it helps. Guessing at records while a site is down usually takes email offline as well, and now there are two problems and no record of the original settings.
Paying an invoice that arrived unsolicited. Official looking domain renewal notices are a long-running scam. Check inside your own account before paying anything you were not expecting.
Deleting a mailbox to tidy up. The mail history goes with it, and that history is often the only record of what was agreed.

How AldoMedia helps

AldoMedia, LLC has been building and maintaining websites for Western New York businesses since 1999, from 656 North French, Ste 2 in Buffalo. Hosting and domains were something we ran for clients long before we sold them separately, which is why support here is people who build websites rather than a script.

It also means we will tell you when the answer is that you need nothing. A certificate warning that turns out to be one laptop with its clock set wrongly is not a product you should be sold. We are an independent authorised reseller for these services, not the registry, the certificate authority or the platform operator, and we say which of those a problem belongs to rather than pretending it is all one thing. There is more on the about page.

If you are not a customer and something is broken, you can still ring.

Common questions

Support questions

Is there someone available around the clock?

AldoMedia is a working web company in Buffalo rather than a call centre, so we do not publish a response time we cannot stand behind. Send anything urgent to the phone rather than the form, because that is the route somebody picks up first. The platforms behind the products run their own support, and we say when a case belongs with them.

Do I get charged for asking a question?

Working out what you need, or what a warning message means, is part of dealing with us. Work beyond that, such as building or repairing a website, is web design work and gets quoted before it starts. We will tell you which of the two your request is at the start, not once it is finished.

Can you help with a website somebody else built?

Usually yes. We look at plenty of sites we did not build. What we need is access, or authorisation from whoever owns the account, and an honest account of what has already been tried. If it sits on a platform we cannot get into, we will say so rather than guess.

My old designer holds the domain and will not reply. Now what?

This is a common call and it usually has a route out. What matters is who is listed as the registrant on the domain, not who built the site. Tell us the domain name and what you know about who registered it, and we will read the public record and tell you which recovery route applies.

Where do I change my card, my plan or a renewal setting?

Billing, renewals and product management are handled in your own account at the storefront, so those changes are made there rather than by us. Sign in with the customer login. If you cannot get in, that is worth a phone call, because a renewal you cannot reach is a renewal that can lapse.

Charges, renewals and cancellations are set out in the refund policy.

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