Is Your Website Really Experiencing Downtime and How to Resolve Common Issues?

A properly running website is central to the success of your online business. Sometimes, on your device your website may not load.  This does not mean your site is actually down, there could be other issues that are causing this issue even though your site is working fine. 

In order to differentiate an actual downtime from other networking issues, you need to carry out some tests that would help you to find out the reason for the problem. Here are some tests that you can carry out to know if your website is really down or if a device configuration, networking or Internet issue is making it falsely appear as a downtime issue.

Making Sure That Users are Experiencing Downtime for Your Site from Everywhere

The first thing that you need to do is confirm whether your site is down for users everywhere or if it is only in your own local computer. You can do this in a number of ways. The simplest way is to call a friend who is using a different network to visit the site and check if the website is working fine on their PC or device.

There are also a number of site monitoring services that allows you to check whether your site is live or experiencing downtime. By using these sites, you can find out the correct status of performance of your site from multiple locations. 

In case, it is only in your personal computer that you are not able to view your site, it could be because you have updated the DNS of your computer recently. If that is the case, you need to check whether this new DNS configuration is causing the mischief.  Change the setting to a more reliable DNS and see if the issue gets resolved.

Using a Proxy to Check Site Availability

It’s possible that your network configuration is not allowing access to the website. With the help of proxy settings, you can bypass your network and visit the website from a different network configuration. If using the proxy settings is loading your site, you can be sure that your site is working fine and there is an issue with your network. 

Delay in Propagating Your DNS Setting Online Make Your Site Unreachable for a While

In case you have recently performed any DNS changes such as adding custom DNS or adding/changing the hosting, the changes might need more time to be propagated online.  During such time, your site may experience downtime. A good way to minimize this issue is to do this DNS change during off-peak hours or days when there are few visitors.

Expired Registration Could Cause Site Downtime

Your site may stop working if your domain has expired. In that case you need to renew your subscription as soon as possible, which will resolve the issue.

Suspended Webhosting Account Causes Downtime Too

If you are not up to date on your payments, then your hosting service provider may stop hosting your website. In such cases, your website may stop functioning and users will experience downtime.  You would need to get in touch with your service provider for resolving this issue. 

Web Hosting Infrastructure Issues Lead to Website Downtime

Another common issue that can lead to downtime for your site is issues with the webhosting infrastructure – this could be server issue, internal network issue with the hosting provider or an Internet connectivity issue at their end.  Whatever the reason, the net result is that the user experiences a down time or performance issue. A simple way to check this is to see if your friends or colleagues are able to access the site from a different network or different city.  Also, to test if there are any server issues, you can run traceroute to the server and try pinging your domain. In case you are not able to complete the traceroute or ping the server, you need to get in touch with your service provider. You could also use a website monitoring service to verify the webhosting uptime status.