The Answer: Same Day
Most agencies give you a contact form, a 48-hour response window, and a project manager who has to check with the design team, who has to check with the developer, who might be on vacation. By the time you get a real answer, your business has been without a web presence for three days.
Media Express is built differently. The person who answers the phone is the person who can commit to your project and start working. We don't have layers between "you have a problem" and "your problem is being solved."
What Counts as an Emergency
We define a digital emergency as any situation where your online presence is broken, absent, or inadequate for an imminent business need. Common categories:
- Site down — Returning 404, 500, 503 errors. White screen of death. Security warnings.
- Site hacked — Showing malware, spam, or redirecting to other sites. Google flagged it as dangerous.
- Developer disappeared — Your developer stopped responding and your project is stalled or your live site is now broken.
- Hard deadline — Event, press release, investor meeting, grand opening — and your site isn't ready.
- Business split — You left a business and need your own web presence immediately.
- Hosting crisis — Provider went out of business, account suspended, domain expired and pointed nowhere.
- Ranking crash — Site dropped from Google results overnight after an update or a penalty.
Our Response Process
- You contact us — Call, text, or email. Describe the emergency briefly.
- We assess within 30 minutes — We ask a few quick questions to understand scope: what's broken, what you need, when you need it.
- We quote and confirm — Written scope and price, usually within 1 hour of first contact. No work starts without your confirmation.
- You provide a deposit — 50% upfront on emergency projects, paid by card. Takes 5 minutes.
- We start immediately — No waiting for a project kickoff meeting next week. We start when you confirm.
- We communicate constantly — Text updates as we hit milestones. You know exactly where things stand.
- We deliver and review — You see the result before it goes fully live. We make adjustments in real time.
- We stay available post-launch — 24-hour on-call after every emergency launch to handle anything that surfaces.
What We Need From You to Move Fast
The faster you can provide these, the faster we launch:
- Your availability — Someone who can answer questions and approve decisions in real time. A 4-hour launch becomes an 8-hour launch when we have to wait for feedback.
- Logo file — Any format. Even a screenshot of your logo is fine to start. We clean it up.
- Basic business info — Name, phone, address, what you do. 5 sentences is enough.
- Domain registrar access — GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google Domains login. If you can't access it, we help you recover it.
- Payment method — Major credit card for the 50% deposit. Takes 5 minutes through our secure processor.
Contact us anyway. We have launched emergency sites with nothing more than a business name, a phone number, and a category. We figure out what we can get, work with what's available, and build something professional. You can fill in the gaps after you're live. Being online imperfectly is infinitely better than not being online.
Real Scenarios We've Handled
The Grand Opening — Site Crashed 18 Hours Before
A Chicago restaurant called us at 9pm the night before their grand opening. Their website — built on a shared hosting plan — had been taken down for TOS violation. They had 150 people coming the next morning and no website, no online menu, nothing. By 2am, they had a clean, mobile-responsive site with menu, address, hours, and a reservation form. The grand opening went without a hitch.
The Disappeared Developer
A Mount Prospect contractor paid a developer $3,500 for a new website. After receiving a partial mockup, the developer went completely silent — no responses to calls, emails, or texts. Three months of trying. The client had no files, no domain access (the developer had registered it), and no working website. We helped recover the domain through the registrar's ownership verification process, set up new hosting, and built a complete 6-page site in 72 hours. Total additional cost: $1,800. The original developer was eventually sued in small claims court.
The Hacked WordPress
A law firm's WordPress site was serving pharmaceutical spam ads. Google Search Console showed it had been flagged as "deceptive site" — meaning anyone clicking their Google result saw a red warning screen. This is catastrophic for a professional services firm. We cleaned the malware, removed the infected files, changed all credentials, implemented a WAF (web application firewall), and submitted a reconsideration request to Google. Total downtime: 6 hours. Google de-flagged the site within 48 hours of the reconsideration request.
The Investor Meeting Tomorrow
A startup founder texted us at 6pm on a Tuesday: "I have an investor meeting at 10am tomorrow and my web developer just told me the site won't be ready for another three weeks. I need something." By 10pm, we had a clean, professional 3-page site live — pitch-ready with the company overview, team page, and contact form. The investor meeting happened. The company got funded.
24/7 Contact Information
For genuine emergencies, the fastest path is always a direct call or text:
- Phone / Text: 773-800-1520 — Artur Borek, Media Express LLC. Available 24/7.
- Email: mail@itguy.services — Mark subject line EMERGENCY for fastest response.
- Contact form: mediaexpress.us/contact/
What Sets Our Speed Apart — 31 Years of Process
Speed in emergency situations is not just about working fast. It's about having done this before — many times — so you don't have to think through the steps. You already know them.
After 31 years of building websites in Chicago, Media Express has a toolkit of ready-to-deploy templates, hosting environments, DNS configurations, and deployment pipelines specifically for rapid launches. We've solved most emergency scenarios before. We don't reinvent the wheel — we execute proven solutions quickly.
We are also small enough that there is no overhead between your call and the person building your solution. At a large agency, your emergency becomes a ticket that gets routed to a project manager who schedules a kickoff call for next week. At Media Express, your emergency becomes a 15-minute intake call followed by work starting.
Frequently Asked Questions
By phone or text (773-800-1520): within 30 minutes, around the clock. By email (mail@itguy.services with EMERGENCY in the subject): within 1 hour. Through the contact form: within 2 hours. For after-hours contacts, Artur Borek personally monitors incoming emergency messages. If you reach voicemail, leave your number and you will receive a callback within 30 minutes.
Yes. Digital emergencies happen on Saturday nights, Christmas Eve, and Sunday mornings. The founder of Media Express, Artur Borek, has been personally available for client emergencies for 31 years. We don't have a 9-to-5 customer service team that routes your emergency to a ticket queue. You get a direct number, you call it, and someone who can actually help answers. This is one of the core differences between a boutique agency and a large company.
In 31 years we have handled: sites crashed the day before a grand opening (rebuilt overnight); developers who disappeared mid-project with client files (domain recovered, site rebuilt in 48 hours); WordPress sites hacked and showing pharma ads (cleaned, hardened, Google de-flagged within 24 hours); businesses that lost hosting access when their provider went out of business (migrated same day); ranking crashes after Google algorithm updates (emergency SEO recovery); and businesses that called us at 11pm needing a website live before a 9am press conference the next morning. We handled all of them.
Size. A large agency has intake processes, account managers, approval chains, and project management layers between you and the person doing the work. At Media Express, when you call with an emergency, you reach the person who will actually build your solution. There's no ticket, no queue, no handoff. 31 years of building identical types of projects means we have templates, processes, and deployment pipelines ready. We've solved most emergency types before. We don't have to figure it out — we execute what we've done dozens of times.
Related Wiki Articles
- What is Emergency Web Design? — What we build in an emergency and what it costs.
- Same-Day Website Launch — Our standard rapid-launch process.
- What is Managed Web Hosting? — How to prevent most emergencies from happening in the first place.