We live in a highly competitive world. Where many businesses are using the internet to get ahead of their competitors. Having a beautiful and attractive website with rich content is one of the ways to drive traffic to your website and business. But just having a website is not enough.
In fact, a website as useful as it can be can actually hurt your business. How? When users cannot fully access the site.
Website failure or website down time can negatively affect the credibility of the site and reduce the popularity, sales and profits. So, although having a website and being present in the online world is very important for a business, it is important to know that preventing the website from going down is just as important, if not more so.
Therefore, it is important to know the key factors that cause website crashes so that you can prevent or fix them.
Table of Contents
What does site down mean?
Downing of a website happens when the website is inaccessible to users or does not work as it should. Of course, site down can be different in each website according to its performance. For example, on an online video streaming site, the controls not working can mean the site is down.
There are various reasons for the site to be down. These reasons can be software, hardware or even human.
Site down is something that happens to any website and is completely unavoidable, because a website works with a set of hardware and software systems and a small error in these systems can cause The site is down.
Normally, website down happens in two ways:
- The first case is when visitors cannot access the entire website, which is called full downtime.
- The second case is when the site has a problem loading some pages, which is called partial downtime.
Why is site down an important issue?
As mentioned, site down happens in all websites, but if it happens repeatedly, you should be a little worried! Because frequent site down can have irreparable consequences. For example, in a store website, when the site is down, in addition to the number of visitors decreasing, current customers will also leave the site and visit your competitors’ website.
In summary, the problems that occur after the site is down are:
- Increasing customers who are dissatisfied with the website and services
- Damage to the commercial reputation of the website
- Reducing the ranking of the site in search engines
- Loss of potential and current customers
- Decrease in income
The main reasons for the site down
Hardware bugs
The first factor to consider after a website crash is hardware. Hardware errors are the reason for more than 55% of website crashes.
Servers are the key part of website infrastructure and any disruption in servers or related hardware can lead to site down. However, server downtime is unpredictable, so you need to use a host that is up-to-date firstly, and secondly, has backup servers and equipment to keep the website up and running if the main server goes down.
DNS problems
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a system that translates domain names into IP addresses. Minor problems in DNS, such as misspellings, can prevent a website from loading, even if the hosting and other infrastructure are working fine.
If you are experiencing frequent DNS issues, you should look into upgrading your DNS hosting. Many hosting companies also offer DNS services. By upgrading the DNS system, you will be given advanced security features, faster servers and many other features and will have more protection against future failures.
CMS problems
A content management system (CMS) makes it easier to design and build a website and publish content. Plugins, themes and other tools that add special features to the site are usually used in CMS. Unfortunately, the incompatibility of some of these items with each other can cause the site to crash or down.
For example, when you update the site theme, this new version must be compatible with your CMS and server. Otherwise, it can cause the website to crash.
There are two ways to avoid CMS problems. The first way is to avoid outdated themes and plugins and get plugins and themes from trusted sources.
The second way is to back up your website regularly. So that if there is a problem with the site, you can use the backup copy.
Programming and human error
Humans are responsible for managing and maintaining web servers. According to statistics, more than 40% of the reasons for site failure are human errors. Errors such as:
- Accidental disconnection of the wire while working with the server
- Mismanagement of servers
- Carelessness or incorrect code checking
Another common human error that causes the site to go down is coding errors. Websites run on thousands of lines of code, which means that even one incorrect comma can cause the site to crash.
There is no way to prevent human errors, but they can be minimized.
Too much traffic to the site
If the website uses shared hosting, when high traffic enters the websites on that shared hosting, it will affect the neighboring sites and can disable the site. Of course, sometimes the site may encounter too much traffic in special situations such as seasonal discounts, and so-called down.
DDoS attack
DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service attacks happen when a high volume of traffic is entered by hackers and makes the website unavailable. Hackers cause the website to fail by increasing the volume of traffic and occupying bandwidth and server resources. Therefore, if the security protocols of the site are not high, the site will be highly vulnerable to these attacks.
Suggesting methods to prevent the site from going down
Using a CDN
CDN networks (Content Delivery Networks) are used as a layer between the server and users that increase the speed and ease of access to the site. A CDN uses a network of cache servers in different locations around the world to store a copy of the site’s content so that users can access the site at a higher speed.
In this way, the CDN acts as a buffer that can serve the site to users even when it is down. In addition, a CDN is a useful solution for short outages, it can also prevent malicious bots from entering the site, and it can also help filter site traffic by analyzing IP addresses.
Choosing the right host
Choosing the right host is very important to prevent the site from crashing. The hosting company must be able to handle the high volume of traffic. In an online business that works entirely on the basis of the website, and expects a lot of traffic, you can’t risk using low-quality and cheap hosting.
Backup
Taking a regular backup of the data should be part of your routine because there is always a possibility of the site going down or crashing. So it’s important to make a backup copy and store data locally and in the cloud if possible. Many hosting providers offer tools for backing up site data.