If you use a business or personal website, downtime can become a serious problem, especially when you do not know the cause or cannot quickly find a solution. We will discuss different aspects of website downtime to help you reduce the risk of these problems.
Definition
A website is experiencing downtime if:
- it is unavailable
- it cannot perform important functions
According to Plesk's official guidance, this risk should be taken seriously because website downtime can threaten the online success of any business and can lead to:
- customer dissatisfaction with your brand and damage to your reputation;
- loss of search-engine visibility;
- loss of revenue.
Today, your website is often the public face of your company, and in many cases customers form their first impressions of your business through it. You may also publish important information on your website, and when that information becomes unavailable it creates an information gap for users.
For this reason, keeping your website available 24/7 is an important objective, even though achieving it can sometimes be challenging.
Major causes of website downtime
Many different factors can cause this type of problem. Plesk highlights several common causes.
Hardware problems
Hardware failures account for a significant share of downtime incidents.
You can reduce risk by protecting cables and network controllers, using reliable power supplies and adding redundancy. However, no hardware setup can provide an absolute guarantee against failure.
Pay attention to the uptime commitment offered by your hosting provider. Lower-quality providers may offer weaker availability guarantees, while production websites should generally look for high uptime targets.
Some companies offer low availability guarantees and provide only limited service credits when downtime occurs. The direct hosting credit may be small compared with the wider business impact of an unavailable website.
Website monitoring can help because it gives you an accurate record of how long your website was unavailable.
DNS problems
DNS problems are another common cause of website or network unavailability. They may result from propagation delays, incorrect configuration, misinterpretation of records or an incorrect server name.
If your website does not load because of DNS, identify the underlying cause as quickly as possible.
DDoS cybersecurity attacks
A DDoS, or Distributed Denial-of-Service attack, occurs when one or more sources flood a server with requests. The objective is to consume server resources, overload the service and make it unavailable.
Your website may not even be the direct target. If another website on the same shared infrastructure is attacked, your own site can also be affected. This is an important consideration when choosing a hosting provider and service type.
Even a personal blog or non-commercial website can be affected if it shares a server with the target of an attack.
Availability risk is therefore especially relevant when you choose to share server resources rather than use dedicated servers or another isolated infrastructure option.
Server and website monitoring
Malicious hackers
Attackers can identify weaknesses in security systems and make a website unavailable. In some cases, they may do this without a direct financial motive, simply because a vulnerable target is easy to exploit.
Unlike broad DDoS traffic, an attacker may specifically target your website. Automated bots are often used to discover sites with vulnerabilities and exploit them at scale.
A website remains exposed to these risks if its security stack, software and monitoring are not kept up to date. Even a relatively small weakness can sometimes lead to a service interruption.
CMS problems
A CMS, or Content Management System, can also cause issues that lead to downtime. For example, installing an incompatible plugin on a WordPress website can break the site.
Database conflicts or other internal application problems can create the same result.
Software failures
Regular software maintenance is important for reducing the risk of service unavailability. Leaving a website unattended for long periods can mean that you do not notice outdated components or failures until a more serious incident occurs.
Without maintenance, a relatively small problem can turn into prolonged downtime.
How to reduce website downtime
Plesk recommends several approaches for reducing this risk:
Use a CDN
A CDN, or Content Delivery Network, is a layer between your website and its visitors. It can improve loading speed and make content more resilient and accessible.
CDNs operate through a network of caching servers distributed across different locations. These servers store copies of website content and deliver it quickly to users who are geographically closer to them.
A CDN can continue serving cached content in some situations even when the origin server is temporarily unavailable. It can also help filter malicious bots and suspicious traffic by analyzing requests and IP addresses.
Use a monitoring service for your website
A website-monitoring service checks your site at regular intervals and alerts you when it becomes unavailable.
A monitoring tool cannot prevent every outage, but it can inform you quickly so that you can respond before the issue affects more users.
Choose monitoring software that checks your site frequently and can send alerts through several channels. It is also useful to maintain a status page that tells customers what issue is currently affecting the service.
The goal is to detect and resolve outages before users have to report them publicly, for example on social media. Preparing an incident-response process in advance is much more effective than trying to design one after an outage has already escalated.
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Choose your hosting provider carefully
One of the best ways to reduce the risk of website downtime is to choose the right hosting provider. The provider should be able to handle your current traffic as well as reasonable future growth.
Choosing a low-quality provider solely because it offers a lower price can put both the website and the wider business at risk, especially when the site is important to revenue or customer service.
Look for a hosting service with a strong availability target, ideally around 99.9% or better for production workloads, and evaluate your budget, requirements and expectations. Spend time reviewing provider specifications and reputation before making a decision.
Create backups of your data
Your business should create backups regularly even when other safeguards are already in place. Keep appropriate copies of important information locally and/or in cloud storage so that recovery is possible if a serious incident occurs.
At SERVER1, we provide different tools that help with backup, availability and daily website management.
If your budget allows, keeping an additional backup with a separate storage provider can further improve resilience.