RightFax Support Tip: What to do if Your Fax Server is Down?

Having your fax server go down in the middle of the day is a serious issue that every company or organization will face at some point. Whether the fix is simple or a bit more complex, knowing what to do in each situation will help you resolve the problem and get back to work more quickly.

The First Step to Take When Your Fax Server Goes Down

The first thing you should do is gather what information you can about the issue. Are you having problems sending or receiving faxes or both? Has the service slowed down or stopped completely? Are you getting any error messages from the system? Many issues can be identified using the Windows Application Event Log viewer. The more you understand about your fax server issue, the faster you or a member of your RightFax support team will be able to fix it.

Classify Your Support Ticket

If your RightFax server is supported by The Fax Guys, you can reach out to our support staff through our online support ticket portal. Just remember that classifying the level of your support ticket will help us understand how urgent your issue is and respond to your request as quickly as possible.

We have four levels of support ticket priorities: Urgent, High, Medium and Low. You can learn more about classifying your support ticket by reading our brief guide.

For the Future: How to Avoid Fax Server Outages

No matter how small the problem, or how quick it is to fix, no fax server outage is good. Thankfully, there are many things you can do in the future to help prevent lengthy outages or fix the problems more quickly:

1. Get a redundant fax server: if your organization handles mission-critical data and relies on faxes to comply with regulations, a shared services model will be a great help to your business. The RightFax shared services model links two fax servers together, allowing them to act as one. If a single server goes down, the other will remain active, preventing your service from being disrupted or data from being lost.
2. Try FaxPing: FaxPing is a special service we offer that occasionally send test faxes (as often as you would like) to your RightFax server, letting you know as soon as you have an outage. This will help reduce the length of time that your fax server is down by alerting you to the problem quickly.
3. Educate Yourself: the quickest way to fix fax issues is to tackle them yourself. That’s why we started RightFax University, our completely free online learning portal. You can watch tutorials, webinars and other online videos that teach you about RightFax. Take a look at some of our troubleshooting videos to help you fix fax server issues on your own.