Why is My Website Go Down?

If you think it's just the smaller websites that are prone to website outages, you're sorely mistaken. Even the big Fortune 500 companies run into downtime on a regular basis. According to Dunn & Bradstreet, approximately half of all Fortune 500 companies experience at least 1.6 hours of downtime each and every week. That equates to about 80 hours of downtime per year. If every minute of downtime equates to lost profits, 80 hours of downtime equates to significant losses. If the Fortune 500 companies are going down, chances are that your site isn't doing much better.

For businesses, a website outage of just a few hours can mean thousands of dollars lost in revenue. To protect your company’s site from unnecessary downtime to save time and money, you should to know what causes your website go down.

What Causes Your Website Go Down?

A website outage can be an unexpected and unfortunate occurrence. The following are the factors that can causes your website go down:

Server Maintenance

Sometimes websites must be deliberately taken offline to perform hardware upgrades or software updates. This is usually done during low-traffic times

Webmaster Errors

>> Coding errors, not optimizing scripts or running too many scripts can cause issues. CMSs, blogs, and forums are likely culprits

>> Forgetting to renew a site’s domain name or hosting contract

DDoS Attacks

>> Distributed Denial of Service

>> Occurs when sites are deliberately targeted with traffic from many sources to cause server overload

Server Overload

>> A tidal wave of web traffic can overload a server

>> With shared servers, resources are limited. One site with heavy traffic, processing needs, or high volume email can cause problems for other sites on the same server

Datacenter Problems

Datacenters are storage facilities holding multiple servers in a controlled environment. Power failures or hardware malfunctions can affect sites hosted on a datacenter’s servers

How to Protect Your Website from Downtime

Use a combination of a CDN service, a backup host and DNS management to protect your site from both short-term downtime and major outages.

CDN Services (Content Distribution Network)

Stores and delivers cached content from your website. Examples: Cloudflare (offers a free version) or MaxCDN. This is easy and effective method to protect against short periods of downtime

Backup Hosting

>> Set-up a secondary hosting account at a completely different hosting company.

>> Preferably on a server in a different geographic location to your primary server. Create and transfer backups to this secondary hosting account on a regular basis. Remember: database-driven websites need to back up their databases.

DNS Management

Invest in a DNS failover service. As soon as the website goes offline, these services automatically route traffic to your secondary host