The Possible Reasons for Unplanned Website Outages

Unplanned website downtimes or outages are web service blackouts because the site will be temporarily inactive for user activity. When the site is not performing the way it is intended, then it becomes a serious setback to businesses, particularly to those that depend on websites for generating revenues. When interruption happens to business continuity due to outages, the losses will be significant even if the disruption is for just a few minutes. Since unplanned outages happen suddenly without any prior warning, the owners will not have the opportunity to prevent it. By the time they realize and work on resolving the issue, the impact could be more devastating than they can afford. In few cases, pinpointing the real issue itself may take several days and till that time the online businesses have to face losses.

Imagine your site which thrives by selling products or services goes down and you will come to know about it after few hours. It will be hard to tackle the situation if downtime duration extends and more likely the business will lose customers, revenues and brand reputation. Some business owners are very particular about maintaining their site continuity and track their site's status round the clock. Fortunately, there are some effective systems like website monitoring service that they can rely on to get notified immediately when issues happen. By partnering with third party website monitor service, online businesses can get a correct picture of their site uptime numbers and also understand the issues that are causing damage to their site functionality. There could be many possible causes that can tarnish the working of a website.

Unreliable Web Hosting

When hosting service is of low quality, websites that are hosted on that specific server will experience frequent downtime issues. Many of them promise higher uptime rates but the number may not be consistent through out the service. It may crunch to lower percentages as the service continues. As a business owner, these numbers may not be acceptable to keep continuity in website working and making customers happy. 

Vulnerabilities in Software

Any issue with coding, wrong configuration of database or using incompatible plug-ins can cause the entire site go down or affect the partial site response. Websites using content management systems can have performance issues when a software or plug-in used is not compatible. Similarly, when scripts and images are not optimized or when complex apps or plugins are used, it slows down the site loading speed thereby affecting its performance.

DNS Problems

The DNS allows users to access the website by name instead of its IP address. When a request is made for a website URL, that request is referred to the DNS server to match the IP address and display the site for the user. It ensures that the users making a request for website domain are directed to the appropriate web page. Most of the time the domain registrar, who may also happen to be the hosting service provider is responsible for configuring the domain settings. Especially, when changes are made to the website, it is essential to route the DNS records to the correct name servers. Any mismatch with IP due to incorrect settings can cause problems with website working. It may either slows down the website or probably crash making the entire site unavailable for user activity. 

Hardware Failures

The most common hardware issues include crashed hard drives or RAM, issues with network cords or cables etc. Diagnosing and fixing hardware issues could be lengthy because it requires troubleshooting and time to analyze the root cause of the problem. Though a good hosting provider takes care of preventing the most commonly encountered issues to ensure proper working of hardware, there is still a chance of experiencing website disruption due to unexpected reasons such as power or equipment failures. 

DDOs / Hacker Attacks

The Distributed Denial of Services (DDOs) is a volumetric attack making it difficult for servers or networks to handle the requests. This can happen especially during holiday season or peak hours when the hosting resources become ineffective to handle the surge in traffic. Unfortunately, the attack could be intentional by the hackers to cause damage to the hosting servers and bring down the services of the entire network. Any website that shares the attacked server can become victim of the attack. The hackers may implement techniques to insinuate viruses or malware into the system to wreak the server or network functionality. DDos attacks are frustrating and potentially harmful to businesses because they take long time to get resolved.

Human Errors

Human errors possibly could be another reason for website outages. This happens typically while setting up the hardware devices or configuring the software applications. The mistakes could be naive and unintentional but requires lot of time to investigate. For instance, any negligence from hosting service can bring the entire network down including all the websites that are dependent on that. This can cause the sites go out of service for days until the issue gets resolved from their side.