Besides being extremely annoying, constant downtimes or even slowdowns can bring serious problems up to compromising the success of your project. So if you experience any issues with your website, it’s critical to start working on solving the causes of frequent crashes as soon as possible.
You shouldn’t believe that users will be loyal enough to keep using your site despite the problems. There are over two billion websites on the internet. Quite a lot of them are in the same niche as your site competing for attention with you. So if you don’t figure out the reason for crushes and slowdowns, you risk:
- Losing your image — users will simply stop trusting your service and go look for a better solution to their needs. It’s impossible to take a business seriously if it can’t handle its website.
- You lose traffic rapidly — users leaving your website, and search engine crawlers being unable to go through the pages result in you losing your SEO points. Eventually, your website will drop very low down the search engine rank ladder.
- You lose money — a one-second slowdown could cost a big corporation around 1 million dollars over a year. How much will constant crashes cost? We are afraid to even imagine that.
It’s hard to not sound grim when talking about the consequences of downtimes. That’s why you should fix the issues that cause crashes. Here are the reasons why you might see your website being unavailable.
Your site is infected
It happens way more often than you might think. Outdated plugins, content management systems, themes, and other software create a lot of vulnerabilities hackers are happy to exploit. That’s why you should always keep your software updated and an antivirus tool working — it will protect your website from viruses. And if you began experiencing downtimes, check your site for malware first things first. If that’s the reason why the website crashes, we hope, you will manage to clean and protect it before Google notices that it’s infected. Otherwise, you will then need to deal with the blacklist.
DDoS-attack
These attacks happen very often, and businesses of all sizes suffer from them. You shouldn’t think that hackers won’t target you — they are often not that picky when it comes to choosing an aim for their actions. Even if malefactors won’t follow the goal to harm precisely you, they could DDoS your website just for fun. That’s why we recommend using our automated anti-DDoS system that will protect your site without needing your control. Then you will have greater peace of mind as King Servers’s security system works for you.
Software issues
Plugins are fun until they crash the website or make it work slower. There is a reason why professionals advise to be moderate with plugins, especially if you’re using Wordpress. This content management system, as well as some others, has lots of plugins available, but quite many of them are created by third-party developers. It means, that Wordpress can’t control both the quality and connectivity of those plugins. And in the best-case scenario, they won’t work. The worst thing that can happen — these plugins will either create vulnerabilities or create some critical issues and make the website crash.
Another problem with plugins is that they create an additional load on the hosting you’re using. Think of them as apps on your phone. When you have too many of those installed, and the memory is overloaded, your device starts working slower, lagging and freezing. The same thing happens to your hosting that simply has not enough resources to process all the load plugins create.
Go through installed add-ons and see if there are any you don’t need. Then update all of them and see if things got better. If they didn’t, consider getting a better hosting that will provide you with more resources. King Servers offers numerous VPS options that can satisfy any needs and budget. This kind of hostings is highly scalable, so it will be easy to get an upgrade when you will require more resources.
Your domain has expired
This is something we always forget about. Domains expire making it impossible for users to get on your website. Check the expiration date to be sure it’s not the reason your site is down.
Poorly written code
This one is tricky, especially if you can’t code. You might think that it’s impossible that the crashes are due to a bad code because you’ve never written a line. But remember that even that template you’ve got to make your website look appealing is a bunch of code lines, too. If you have no expertise in this, but you feel like the issue might be in the poorly written code, you can hire a specialist that will check this for you.
You’re out of resources
We’ve already mentioned that the site might crash or get slow because the hosting is struggling with the load your website creates. Each site is basically a set of folders and files that weigh something in terms of bytes. Just like files on your computer, they take up space on the hosting. And when there is no free space, the issues begin. Make sure that the resources your hosting provides you with are sufficient for your website. If you’re not confident in your knowledge here, just drop us a line. We will check your site and see if there is a better solution for it.
You’re getting too much traffic
It’s about the resources of your hosting again. If the traffic is larger than it can handle, the website will crash. It often happens to e-commerce websites as their owners estimate the required resources incorrectly. They tend to look at the current stats and take a bit higher when actually they should calculate a possible load that will happen during special offers or holiday seasons. These events are precisely when most e-commerce sites crash. You can look into dedicated servers by King Servers if your website is rather large. We can provide you with enough resources and reliable service so that your users always have access to your site.
There is one more reason why you might experience issues with your site — your hosting vendor fails to provide you with reliable service. It’s not a concern with King Servers. Our VPS hostings and dedicated servers are always up and running with 99.9% uptime. We constantly monitor the hardware to make sure everything works properly. And we sign the service-level agreement that protects you in case something goes wrong.
