Popular reasons for the fall of sites

Slow loading and incorrect work of the site, a complete drop of a web resource or the inaccessibility of individual pages is a real disaster for any online business, regardless of subject matter and direction. Traffic is lost, potential customers are leaving for competing resources, sales are falling, seo-indicators and positions in search results are falling. This publication is devoted to the review of the most common problems and typical "diseases" of sites, based on the experience of the service monitoring accessibility sites HostTracker and its customers.

Causes of website unavailability

Unstable work or complete inaccessibility to visitors of large online stores and selling single pages, blogs and social networks, forums and other resources can be triggered by many reasons. Let's name the most common:

• Technical malfunctions on the servers where the site is located. This may include both failed equipment and a fallen network, as well as shortcomings in hosting organization at the logical level. Also, technical works are included here - of course, they will warn you about them, but the site will not work at this time anyway.
• The discrepancy between the hosting tariff and the site load (high traffic), or the discrepancy between the actual and declared hosting performance. That is, many visitors have come - and here either we have not calculated our strength, or the greedy hosting has deceived us. There are also more complicated situations - for virtual hosting, for example, a “fat neighbor” can be caught on the same server, which will have all the resources. It is difficult to track, especially if the hoster follows the precepts of those Eastern religions, where non-interference and serenity are practiced.
• Problems with the site. Hope for hosting, but not yourself. Not optimized scripts, a database in New Zealand, incomprehensible cascading redirects can lead to the fact that the average visitor will be at least uncomfortable to use the site. If you see a lot of 503 errors in the logs, and the site works for you personally - trust the logs and run to look for a problem. Very often, the problem description begins with the words “Everything works for me!”
• Actions hackers. There is an option when your site is “ordered”, in which case it may undergo a DDOS attack, including http flood — when a hacker generates a huge number of simultaneous requests to the site. However, much more often the hacker is working on creating the next botnet and he liked your site or hosting simply because of the presence of some kind of vulnerability. Here they are infected with viruses and other malware.
• Late payment services. Very popular reason. Do not pay for hosting, forget to extend the domain or not renew the SSL certificate - and the site goes offline, at best, for several hours. It happens worse .

How to deal with it?

To avoid churning customers and falling sales, reducing positions when ranking by search engines, you need to constantly monitor the resource, get timely information about the inaccessibility of the site for users and troubleshoot.
In other words, constantly maintain the site.
It is physically impossible to monitor the functioning of web resources around the clock, constantly reloading individual pages in manual mode. Therefore, it is desirable to automate the process of work, updates and monitoring of the site, as well as to somehow set up feedback - in time to learn about the problems. Popular solutions are Yandex.Metrica and Google Analytics services. They act as follows: the client places on his site a special script that, every time he enters the visitor’s site, sends the data to the right place. First, you get a lot of good statistics. Secondly, if a visit to the site suddenly falls, then there is an assumption that there is something wrong with the site about which they can notify you. They can separately recheck. Different services offer different interesting features. But there are also separate professional tools for such tasks.
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Monitoring Services: Problem Identification

You can diagnose a web resource, identify the causes of problems and establish round-the-clock control over the functioning of the site using specialized services. Monitoring services provide various tools for comprehensive and fully automated site checking. An example of such a service is, in fact, HostTracker .
With the help of such services, you can easily and quickly find the weaknesses of the site and get a real picture of its behavior in time, as well as avoid rewards uncomplicated and punish the innocent.
This works for all the above problems. If the service shows that the site “jumps” download speed, while the number of visitors is evenly distributed throughout the day, or timeouts are returned - questions to the hoster. It can also be an indication that your site has “outgrown” the initial package of hosting services purchased once, and now it needs more resources for stable operation. To the hoster, the same questions arise if he guarantees the SLA 99.9% in the contract, and he himself spends many hours of technical work every month: it is easy to check whether he has violated his guarantees. If 50X errors often fall out, it’s most likely a matter of the site or server settings. In this case, contact the developers. Services also control the validity of certificates and domains , notifying in time of the need for renewal, as well as many other things.

Is it necessary?

Of course, there are different tools to solve any problem. When choosing a particular it is worth assessing the possible losses. The easiest way to do this is for a site with direct sales: if 100 purchases are made on it per day, then, roughly speaking, an idle hour will cost the seller 4 transactions. If the site is not directly related to commerce - it is more difficult to evaluate, but it is also possible. How much will the company's reputation suffer if a client tries to access a non-working site? How many of them will go to competitors? How much money spent on advertising will be in the bin if the site breaks down at the start of the campaign due to an excessive influx of visitors? How quickly can you personally identify the problem of slow work of the site, due to which customers are uncomfortable to use it and they, again, go to competitors? And some sites work like this for months. I don’t even want to mention the hijacking of “forgotten” domains due to the non-renewal of these and other very sick things.
Ways to solve each of the problems, as already mentioned, there are different. Both paid and free (monitoring services, as a rule, also have a free package, including HostTracker ). We are sure that if you do not lose sight of this problem, then there will definitely be a suitable option, and your websites will work like a clock.