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You’ve heard much about why your website uptime is crucial for your business, right? However, do you know what are the reasons for a website to go down?
By learning about the most probable issues, you could figure out how to act to prevent downtimes or get the site back on track quickly if is unavailable.
What are the major causes of a website downtime?
- planned server maintenance - you are usually informed in advance and can let your customers know it too.
- routine server maintenance - (remember, even with 99,9% uptime your hosting provider reserves 0,01% of time) - it usually should not last longer than 30 minutes and this period is seldom announced in advance.
- server software/hardware fault - it is a machine, and can sometimes break up.
- server connectivity failure - can be caused by network issue or firewall
- DNS fault - if DNS lookup issue arises, it won’t be able to resolve your domain.
- bad code, plugin or module malfunctioning.
- hacking attack - if the site is not secure enough, it may be easily broken.
Steps to take if your site goes down unexpectedly:
Call your hosting provider - you should find out whether it’s a server-side problem or your website’s.
Check your DNS servers - The site itself may be ok, but incase of DNS lookup issue visitors won’t be directed to your website.
Disable plugins - if you recently installed any new modules or plugins, try disabling them, it may get the site back up.
Check the site for malware - hackers may have injected the site, so check your .htaccess, and index.php.
Check your core database files - you may have to hire a professional to do it for you.
How to prevent website downtimes?
Let’s face it: unless you’ve got magic powers, you won’t be able to ensure 100% uptime to your website. What you can and should do is take steps to minimise both downtime and losses caused by it.
There are several ways to achieve maximum uptime:
- Enhance security measures to protect the store against attacks
- Check your site for errors often to timely detect and fix problems.
- Conduct web monitoring of your site availability to be informed right when the site goes down.
You don’t have time to test everything manually? Have it done automatically with Shopping Cart Diagnostics! This is a monitoring tool to check all your estore areas including security, availability, performance and much more. You’ll get instant notifications in case of any errors to fix them shortly.
Register an account to get a personal guard for your store! For further details, check out www.shopping-cart-diagnostics.com
