How to Reduce Downtime
If you’ve ever had to suffer from your website being down for whatever reason, then you’ll know just how infuriating the whole process is. You should also know how important it is to reduce your downtime however and whenever you can.
To reduce downtime, you have to resolve to prevent it before it happens, and you have to know how to deal with it when it does. Fortunately, advice on what to do in both of those instances can be found below.
How to prevent downtime
To stand a chance of being able to avoid dreaded website downtime completely, you must try to prevent it. Even if your site shows no sign of a potential crash, you must take it upon yourself to perform the following tasks…
Sort out your DNS
Many downtime problems are caused by Domain Name System (DNS) troubles. When this cache is itself down, the rest of your website doesn’t stand a chance of working — without the connection and access the all-important downed DNS servers usual offer; your site won’t be able to function. To sort out this problem, you can either flush out your DNS cache or, as a preventive measure, you can simply back it up regularly.
Work alongside a web hosting company
An unlimited web host will offer you around-the-clock support with regards to downtime prevention. It will offer you the chance to back up your site and its files and will grant you access to an unlimited amount of databases
Make use of an uptime monitor
An uptime monitor or robot is a piece of technology that watches your website at all times. If it ever detects that your site has, in fact, gone down, it will alert you right away. It would then be your job to get everything working again.
How to deal with downtime
If your site does go down at any point, whether you take preventive actions against it happening or not, then you have to act quickly to get everything up and running again. By not acting swiftly, you will miss out on internet traffic, which could, subsequently, lead you to lose out on custom as well. To deal with the issue of downtime once it takes place, you should:
Make sure that your site is actually down
Downtime can easily be mistaken for a simple internet connection failure. Before you take any action with regards to trying to get your site back up, then, you should make sure that downtime is the actual problem.
Aim to determine the cause of your problem
By being able to unearth the root of your problem, you’ll be able to tackle it far quicker and with greater precision. There could be any number of causes, the main three to look out for, however, are DNS problems, expired domains, and hardware related issues.
In order to both prevent and deal with your website experiencing downtime, consider the points above. You have to do all you can to safeguard your site against it, and you have to know how to tackle it when it occurs.
