Common Issues That Negatively Impact Website Uptime

One of the important components for running a successful online business is high website uptime. To have an effective and good user interaction through your website, the site should remain up continuously without downtime issues. It is a critical for every site owner to keep track of their uptime numbers to make sure the site is functional for internet users. For uptime monitor, neither they can rely on hosting services nor they can spend the whole day watching their websites manually. The easiest way is to have a tool that verifies constantly the site's uptime rate and checks if anything is affecting the performance of the website. To watch uptime regularly, a website monitoring service would be appropriate as it gives the true uptime statistics on websites and pinpoints the possible issue for downtime.

There could be many reasons that can negatively impact website uptime.

Scheduled Maintenance and Upgrade

Planned downtimes are typically scheduled by the hosting providers when there is a necessity for hardware maintenance or software upgrades. If scheduled properly at off peak hours, then planned downtimes do not interrupt the normal productive operations. In such cases, the site owners can take precautionary measures to display an error message to let the visitors know about the site maintenance. On contrary, if the hosting service doesn't plan maintenance properly and if the site is taken down during peak hours, then businesses are likely to have losses in terms of sales and revenues. In addition to that, hosting providers do not include planned downtimes when calculating the uptime for websites. There will be a significant difference between the uptime percentage provided by the hosting service and the actual uptime that the site will be experiencing. With the help of website monitoring uptime statistics report, you can easily get the accurate uptime/downtime percentages and know the number of times your site is experiencing an outage of any kind.

DNS Server Issues

When there is a trouble connecting to the websites, DNS problems could be one of the possible reasons. Monitoring DNS server functionality is very important for website uptime and performance because even a small issue with configuration or server settings, the site may become unresponsive to the users. It is not easy to determine the scope of the problem because the reasons for DNS failures could be many. Resolving the problem may require some expertise which is not as simple as pinging the server's IP address. A good website monitoring service with DNS monitoring ability will be helpful in testing the websites for any DNS related issues and alert immediately if there is any performance degradation problem.

Poor Quality of Web Hosting

It’s no secret that not all web hosting providers offer the same quality of service and some budget hosting providers in particular have bad reputation for frequently going down. The choice of hosting provider and the service plan are both important in maintaining website uptime and performance. If the provider is of low quality, then there is less possibility of having good uptime percentages. On the other hand, if you choose a plan with reseller or shared hosting, then your website will have shortage of resources such as bandwidth & disk space. You may not even know how your site will react if there is a surge in traffic during holiday season. Either way, the site will be suffering frequent unexpected downtimes impacting your business revenues. One way of knowing the issues with hosting service is to use a good website monitoring service. With the information provided by the monitoring service, you can easily evaluate the hosting service and can make the right decision on your website hosting needs.

Crash Or Overload Of Servers

Business owners aspire to keep their websites active without any unplanned downtimes, particularly when there is a possibility of generating higher revenues during peak seasons. Unfortunately, if there is a sudden surge in traffic, then websites would not perform as expected and may experience downtime. Another reason for denial of website access could be DDoS attack, in which case the servers or entire network stop functioning due to overwhelming requests from the users. Either the website will be completely down due to server crash or it may have degraded performance because of overload on servers. With the help of a good site monitoring service, they can better handle such situations as it allows them to check on various network activities and track changes in site traffic.

Other Unexpected Issues

When we say unexpected issues, it could be the problem with internet / network or a technical issue due to coding error or incompatible plugins. Or perhaps, even a power outage at hosting service or ISP location, can disrupt the functionality of your website. As a website owner, you need to be very particular about maintaining the site continuity without breakdowns and have a good watch on its overall performance. There are numerous things that you should check on regular basis to make sure the site has good uptime, working normally for all end users at different locations. If you aren’t monitoring your site for uptime/downtime and other parameters, you may have to face the consequences in terms of lost customers, revenues, sales, brand reputation or all of the above.