It can inevitably frustrate both the users and webmasters when a website consistantly goes down or becomes unavailable. These frustrations usually lead to your followership choosing to abandon your website, without any hesitate. In other words, website crashing can cause you losing valuable traffic and ultimately revenues for your website.
It is really terrible, isn’t it?
There are many reasons that website outages may happen, including DDoS attacks, coding errors, traffic spikes, hackers/breaches, etc. Here let’s take an in-depth look at several most common causes for your website to crash.
Expired Domain
Your domain name is the specific address to which users are able to reach your website. If your domain registration expires, your website will be impossible to be visible on the internet.
To figure out whether or not your website downtime is caused by the lapsed domain registration, you’d better find out the email sent by your domain registrar that includes both your purchase and expiration date information. Or, you can go to a website like www.whois.com to shot a quick check and see when it’ll expire.
Poor Quality Web Hosting
Poorly performing web hosting service has been a major cause of website downtime. This especially happens a lot to small businesses.
Though almost every web hosting provider guarantees minimum 99.9% uptime and promises to reimburse you for the price you paid for the length of time your website was down, it’s just a small comfort when consider the revenue you lost because of the website going down every week.
In addition, server crashing is also a commonly seen web hosting issue that leads to website downtime. Severe weather, hardware malfunctions, or power failures are all possible causes to server crashing when multiple servers are housed within a controlled environment—data center. When this happens, you can do nothing but wait for the server to be fixed. What’s more, regular server maintenance such as hardware upgrades or software updates often need to be taken offline. But if your web hosting provider is experienced and smart enough they will inform you and transfer your website to another normally operational server ahead of time.
Plugin/Code Errors
If you have downloaded some extensions to your website, you are risking slow page loading times or a screeching halt because not all third-party plugins are optimized to work well with your website. Also, the plugins may be outdated or completely defunct if their creators have abandoned them, therefore resulting in coding errors that can paralyze the entire site.
Similar to the plugin errors, if you or one of your employees has made a clumsy mistake writing code in the process of building a new feature for the “Support Center” tab, for instance, the messy coding pieces will bring everything down with them.
DDoS Attacks
Distributed-denial-of-service attack, usually known as DDoS attack, refers to two or more attackers attempt to crash a website or cause it to freeze by using multiple computers to flood a server with requests for the purpose of overwhelming it. It has been more common to witness several high profile DDoS attacks in recent years. But it is nothing to do with if you’re hosting a small blog site on a shared server and sharing the server resources with someone who’s targeted. Everyone could be at risk of such thing like this.
However, it makes sense if your web hosting provider can well segregate you from other users who are the targets of the DDoS attack. And having a dedicated server is also helpful for mitigating the risk of DDoS attacks because you are allowed to take any measure to protect yourself.
Massive Traffic Spike
No website owner dislikes high traffic. But a sudden influx of web traffic could be a disaster to your website sometimes, when your website’s hosting environment has no ability to handle unplanned traffic spikes. It’s not easy to see traffic spikes unless you start an email market campaign with or add video/audio files to the small blog site.
Website crashing can be costly beyond your expectation. So, you’d better keep the above issues in mind and monitor your website for uptime/downtime regularly. You may also find that most website crashing reasons are related to the web hosting provider, making sure your website is hosted with a reliable, secure hosting company is extremely important. At this point, Bisend is definitely a good option to consider.
