It is a digital fact of life due to hardware issues or many other things which are mostly outside the control of the web provider. A ‘website down‘ problem is mainly caused by one of the following reasons: The entire server has crashed. a networking problem. Something has crashed on the server.
The main reasons for the downing of the website –
- Server overload
If your website is hosted by your host on a shared server, whenever your site bounces, your host may suspend or shut down your site to protect other sites. Similarly, if other sites on the server face heavy traffic, due to the bad neighbor effect, it may affect the availability of your site as well.
- Malicious Cyber Attack (DDoS)
You need to beware of curious incidents of sudden increases in traffic. This unusual amount of traffic to your site could be an attempt by hackers or malware to cause a major disruption. DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attempts to attack your site in which a network of systems sends high amounts of fake traffic just to take down the site.
- Hardware and Software Issues
Surprisingly power failure still tops the list of reasons that cause massive power cuts across the world. In 2010 Amazon attributed a major outage to a hardware failure. Periodic hardware maintenance and absence of service schedules can result in unexpected failure leading to downtime. On the software front, if outdated and incompatible versions of WordPress plugins and themes are present, it can cause trouble for users accessing your site.
- Miscellaneous Reasons
According to one study, more than 40% of outages are due to human errors such as :
- Accidentally unplugging the cord while working with the server.
- Improper and rough handling of servers.
- Careless or inappropriate code review.
Amazon suffered several hours of downtime in 2017 when an employee executed code with a minor error that took a large set of servers offline, rendering AWS services inaccessible for three hours. Apart from all this, uncontrolled factors like natural disasters can also affect your services to a high level.
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What to do if the “website is down”?
There are several things to consider when you experience the ‘website down’ issue :
Have you recently made any modifications/changes that may have resulted in this problem?
Any action you have taken recently on the website may result in unexpected performance issues. This is important for platforms like Joomla, WordPress, and Magento where you are likely to face plugin/theme compatibility issues. Very often, it hinders the functionality or specific sections of your website and almost breaks and sometimes brings down the entire site. Thus, facing a ‘website down‘ problem.
As an appropriate course of action, you should modify what you did to the site, determine the exact changes made, and consider leaving the changes behind when you try to resolve the issue.
Is the website working now?
While making changes to your live website you will be able to see the changes on your site. This is why excessive modifications to your live website are not recommended. Instead, you can create a development environment for your website that allows you to test the functionality of the website before and after the necessary modifications.
Is this website down?
Related: website visitor counter
You’ll be disappointed when your internet is running fine but one page you want to access keeps giving you a Server Not Found error. Relax and before getting into heavy-duty troubleshooting mode check first to see if this is your problem.
You may have received a helpdesk ticket from a user stating that they are unable to access a page on your website. Here, you can use ‘Website Down Checker‘ to perform a quick check on your website to check whether the web server is available externally or not and respond before pressing the panic button. You can then take the appropriate steps to get it back up and running.
- You want to check whether this website is closed for all or just for you :
Sometimes, your site shuts down during the daily grind. In this case, you can use “Website Down Checker” to see if there is something wrong with your network or if the problem is beyond your control.
How to monitor website availability?
Here are some ways to set up monitoring :
- Use Custom Alerts in Google Analytics. They are triggered when Google detects that traffic is below some specified value. Information will be sent to your email.
- Develop a loyal community in social media. Regular users of your web resource will notify you via Facebook or Twitter when the site is down.
- Set up Sitecheckerbot monitoring.