You Guide to Understanding and Preventing the Most Common Causes of a Website Crash

Living in fear of a website outage?

98% of businesses say just a single hour of downtime will cost them over $100,000. If you don’t want to get caught out, you need to understand the common causes of downtime and how to avoid it.

That’s why we’ve put together this guide to teach you how to avoid a website crash.

Avoid A Broken Code Website Crash

Some problems start at home.

If your website is badly put together, you can expect things to break. An outage on the home page, in particular, will block access to the rest of your site. At its most extreme, bad code could cause your site to crash.

Flawed code might even pop up from simple human error. Typos and other errors in the code can disable a website as easily as a bad coding job.

Even in less extreme cases, poor code introduces flaws into the user experience. Working with a UX expert like UX 4Sight can avoid loss of functionality.

Hosting Problems

Your website depends on architecture provided by a third-party company.

These companies have their own problems, too. Hosting providers can suffer problems with their code, just as you can. Or sudden hardware failure can also knock your site offline.

Hosting problems are some of the trickiest to deal with because you’ll often lack control over the situation. They’re also not very predictable. Finding a host with strong credentials is the only way to minimize this risk.

Traffic Spikes

It’s nice when people notice you. It’s not nice to experience a website crash as a result.

A traffic spike can overwhelm your website, causing it to crash. This has become increasingly common in the age of viral content. A simple share on social media can send tens of thousands of new visitors flocking to your site.

For smaller businesses, outages often come from exceeding your bandwidth package with your host. Hosts might also lock users out of your site if they detect unusual activity.

Expired Domain

This is why you want to note the date your domain expires on your calendar.

Failing to renew your domain will make your site inaccessible. Even worse, someone could snatch up your domain and force you to choose a new one.

Luckily, this is one of the easiest issues to avoid. You’ve likely set your domain to auto-renew, but checking in on the details before the deadline is a good policy.

Deliberate Action

Sometimes, there’s more than a technical fault at work. Deliberate action is also capable of causing a website crash.

One of the most common forms of deliberate action is the DDoS attack. DDoS stands for “Distributed Denial of Service”. It’s an elaborate way of saying someone is creating a traffic spike on your site through artificial means.

Sometimes it’s driven by a particular motive. Other times, it’s simply the internet equivalent of vandalism. Either way, deliberate action usually requires special actions to resolve.

A Website Crash is Inevitable

Sadly, you’re sure to face a website crash at some point in your business life. Even the most high-profile services experience outages. But with a bit of knowledge, you can do your best to reduce downtime and avoid some of the most common causes.

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