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Website Down | Learn What Could Be The Most Common Issue

Nothing could be more heart-jerking than having your Website Down. In the event that a website down error occurs, it takes more than two seconds to load. With this in mind, 14% of your customers will leave and find another place to shop. Imagine what your customers would do if your website was unavailable for more than two seconds.

That’s why a website downtime crash simply isn’t an option for online businesses. Take a look at the most common causes of website crashes so you can stay on top of them and keep your website running. It’s a website owner’s worst nightmare: You type in your domain, but instead of seeing your beautiful website design, you’re greeted with a blank screen.

How long has it been down? What went wrong? And more importantly, how do you fix it as soon as possible?

The Moment Your Website Down Error Occurs

Sooner or later, all webmasters go through that panic-inducing experience. There are innumerable causes of website outages, including:

  • Hacker attacks
  • Viral traffic (also known as the “Digg effect”)
  • Deliberate DDOS attacks
  • Natural disasters wreaking havoc on your data centers
  • A minor mistake in your website’s code
  • Scheduled server maintenance by your web host

Therefore, website outages aren’t just an annoyance — they can be very costly for businesses. Amazon reportedly lost $66,240 per minute when it was down briefly in 2013.

Website Down for Maintenance

Site is currently down for maintenance, A teal and white sign with the words Site is currently down for maintenance on a computer keyboard. Your business may not be the size of Amazon’s, but downtime can still be deadly.

Evolven, an IT operation analytics company, estimates the cost of downtime across industries to average $5,600 per minute in missed revenue and employee productivity. When you own a website for any length of time, downtime is unavoidable: it will happen sooner or later.

What causes a Website Down?

Generally speaking, no matter what problem you’re having, you should contact your Web Hosting Service Provider. They should be able to help you figure out any problem you’re having, especially if it is a problem hosting problem. That being said, they should help you with other website problems as well. Such as;

1. Website Down for Maintenance

For many website engineers, you’ll agree that; not even a single Website and or Application meets the 100% threshold. Which means, after the successful completion of an AMP Ready and Responsive Website, other factors follow. Including, data usage from the general online traffic, upgrade of theme layout, new plugins update, code integration, social media platforms merger, etc.

Some of these processes require a Website Downtime in order to control the general access of the Domain Files. However, the majority of low-class developers takes all the risk by working on the backend files, especially on the Cpanel exposing themselves to external infiltration.

At times, as soon as the line is open, it provides an easy way for the Website and Application hijackers. Including the hackers who steal valuable information, files and times disfiguring the whole setup. Therefore, it is always recommended that you inform your website visitors of downtimes prior to the planned offline timelines.

2. Traffic and Visitors Error

This just means too many people tried to visit your website at once. You know on Black Friday when so many people rush into a store at once things end up breaking and people get hurt? When too many people visit your website at once, it kind of becomes its own little Black Friday.

You probably remember back in 2015 when the Theater Websites Crashed because so many people were trying to buy tickets to “The Force Awakens.” It’s the same thing for your website. If too many people try to look for Exterminators Reviews near Rock Hill SC and the Go Forth website isn’t ready, it could crash. Make sure that your server can handle a sudden rush of traffic so that doesn’t happen to you.

3. Domain and Hosting Error

Your domain name is the address to your website. If you invited someone over to your house but didn’t give them the address, they wouldn’t be able to find the house. The same thing happens with a domain name.

If people can’t find your domain, they can’t find your website. Especially on the instances when the domains name expires as well. If your domain expires, your website will no longer appear online. Make a habit of checking the expiration date of your domain to make sure it never expires.

Sometimes your website can go down because you don’t have a large enough hosting plan. Maybe you forgot about your plan and haven’t updated it since you started your website. Or maybe your website just had a sudden growth.

Either way, as your website continues to develop and get more traffic, your hosting plan should grow with it. If your hosting plan is too small and a lot of people try to get onto your website, it will shut itself down. Fortunately, this error is a simple fix. Just contact your hosting providers and select a larger plan.

4. Hackers, Virus Attacks and Code Errors

For instance, sometimes your website may crash because you, or someone else who has access to your website, accidentally broke the web code. This usually happens because someone messes something up while they’re doing maintenance or updating the website.

If you experience a website crash after you know someone was working on it, then it probably crashed because of a code error. As can be seen, increasingly, online attacks are the other extremes towards a website crash. These attacks could be from bots or actual people maliciously trying to hack into your website.

There are a lot of bots on the internet, and a lot of them carry virus software. They are like the insects of the internet. They crawl around the internet and try to find websites they can break into. If one gets attracted to your website, the rest will swarm, usually causing your website to crash. The bots don’t even have to even break in to make the site shut down.

To enumerate, Hackers are people deliberately trying to break into your website. One of the easiest hackers attacks is called a DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service attack. This means the hacker overwhelms your website with traffic from all kinds of sources. If the hacker is successful, your website will crash.

5. Plugin, Spamming, and Extension Errors

5.1. Website Down on Spamming

Spamming is common to the website and social media platforms affiliated to large visits and searches leading to Subscribers. Whereas, the innocent online readers and site visitors spam your Cpanel webmail with subscription messages which you’ll find tiring going through.

In most cases, the jmexclusives Team advice you to integrate a third-party carrier through POP3 such as Gmail. Whereas you are able to offload some of your CPU Memory usage accumulated by constant emails in your hosted accounts. Equally important, allow the POP3 carrier to leave no copy on the main account emptying the emails to your Gmail account.

5.2. Plugin & Extensions Conflict

A plugin or extension are pieces of software that add to your website and give it additional features. In other words, they let your website display content and functions that weren’t originally part of your site.

Think of it this way, you buy a new phone, but it doesn’t have any way to store or play music. So you download a music app, and now your phone can play music, something it wasn’t able to do before. The problem with plugins and extensions is that they’re made by other people you don’t know.

Some of those creators may make one that isn’t very stable and others may make a great plugin but fail to update it. Whether the plugin or extension is just not made very well or not updated, they can sometimes give out. When that happens, your whole website can crash.

6. Privacy, Cookies, and Terms of Use

According to ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), websites and applications subjected online must meet all the criteria. The body is responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several databases related to the namespaces and numerical spaces of the internet. Ensuring the network’s stable and secure operation.

Therefore, undermining their call could result in a website and or an application online being suspended or even blacklisted. Another key point is that; the EU (European Union) General Data Protection Regulation is a rule passed by the EuropeanUnion in 2016.

Setting new rules for how companies manage and share personal data. And more so online through their websites and or end-user applications. For an industry that’s used to collecting and sharing data with little to no restriction, that means rewriting the rules of how ads are targeted online.

Generally speaking, it is a general requirement for every Website to have an SSL Certificate encrypted on the Domain name URLs. Notifying the site visitors that the site is secure to browse and make purchases online. Meaning a site existence my indefinitely be terminated for the violation of PrivacyCookies and Terms policy.

When the Giants Website Down Strikes

Important to realize, having the main Social Media Platforms on the ground might be confusing as well as tear-jerking amongst the loyal fans. However, for others, the Social Media Platforms and their composites are still accessible. Including, the Facebook Profile, Page, Group, Instagram for Mobile, WhatsApp, and even Gramblr. But, what if these social media faced a website down mockery?

For businesses, a website outage of just a few hours can mean thousands of dollars lost in revenue. Be proactive and protect your company’s site from unnecessary downtime to save time and money. Every website is vulnerable to an outage, even larger, well-known companies occasionally suffer website downtime.

Microsoft: June 2014

  • Lync Online communication service:
    • Caused by external network failures
    • Services were down for several hours
  • Microsoft Exchange Online:
    • Some users couldn’t access their email while others experienced delays
    • The outage lasted about 9 hours
  • The outages were not related
    • They only affected users in the US

Google: January 2014

  • Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar and Google Plus were all affected by the outage
  • Affected users all over the world
  • Lasted about an hour
  • Caused by a software bug
  • Google stock decreased by 2.4% after the outage

Twitter: March 2, 2014

  • Ellen DeGeneres tweeted a selfie of herself and other stars at the Oscars
  • Broke the record for the most retweeted tweet
    • 3 million retweets in under an hour
  • Twitter was down for about 15 minutes

Error 404 Website Down

As soon as you know why your site is offline, notify customers about the problem and when you expect to be back online.

Protect Your Website Down Errors

A website outage can be an unexpected and unfortunate occurrence. Being prepared for an outage will allow your site to get back on track for your customers in a timely manner. Use a combination of a CDN service, a backup host and DNS management to protect your site from both short-term downtime and major outages.

  1. CDN Services (Content Distribution Network)

    • Stores and delivers cached content from your website
      • Examples:
        • Cloudflare (offers a free version)
        • MaxCDN
      • An easy and effective method to protect against short periods of downtime
  2. Backup Hosting

    • Set-up a secondary hosting account at a completely different hosting company,
    • Preferably on a server in a different geographic location to your primary server
      • Create and transfer backups to this secondary hosting account on a regular basis
        • Remember: database-driven websites need to back up their databases
  3. DNS Management

    • Invest in a DNS management/failover service
    • Such as EasyDNS.com and DNSmadeEasy.com
      • As soon as the website goes offline, these services automatically route traffic to your secondary host

Other Website Down Options and Tips:

  • Use a scalable hosting plan: Many VPS & Cloud hosting plans allow you to scale RAM/resources in real-time to meet the demands of traffic spikes.
  • Some hosting companies offer managed to host support with DNS management & automatic backups. Especially to a secondary server in an all-inclusive service
    • This is sometimes referred to as “mirroring” or “mirrored servers”
  • If you don’t have technical expertise on staff:
    • Ask your host if they can help
    • Or hire an IT consultant to manage your website
  • Use a website monitoring service like Pingdom or Pingability
    • Alert you by email or text message if your site is down

Summing Up,

On one hand, most of the social media platforms user heavily relies on the deliverance in terms of news and updates. On the other hand, the Social Media Platforms, especially Facebook provides its user with high-end news and networking media.

As of Instagram, its Feed keeps a loop on audiovisual connectivity between its users. While Whatsapp platform provides its users with high end-encrypted and free messaging services.

Finally, Twitter is an American online news and social networking service. On which users post and interact with messages known as “tweets”. Tweets were originally restricted to 140 characters, but on November 7, 2017, this limit was doubled to 280. Not to mention, for all languages except Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Thanks to Wikipedia.

If you have further questions you’d like the jmexclusives to provide answers to, especially through their Online FAQs Page, Contact Us. You can as well leave your contributions and views below this post on the Comments Box. Or follow the following useful and related links.

  1. Site Uptime – To Top 8 Reasons Behind A Website Crash.
  2. Natasha Courtenay Smith – A Tale of Two Feeds: Just what is The Difference Between Facebook and Instagram?
  3. Imore – Instagram: Everything you need to Know! – Facebook: Everything you need to Know! – WhatsApp: Everything you need to Know!
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