Tips for Troubleshooting Website Downtime When Your Website Monitoring Service Sends You an Alert

You know that website downtime is one of the pitfalls that you definitely don't want your business to run across. You realize that downtime equates to lost profits and, as a result, you have all of your ducks in a row. Your T's are crossed and your I's are dotted. You have website monitoring service in place to notify you the moment any website downtime occurs so you can get your site back up within minutes of receiving a message from your website monitoring provider. It is also important, however, to familiarize yourself with the most common reasons you would receive such a message so you know how to handle the issue if the time does come to get your site back up and running so you can recover from any downtime quickly and efficiently.

Check with Your Internet Service Provider

Internet service providers are not perfect. You will not find a single hosting provider that has a 0 downtime rate. That is one of the many reasons why website monitoring service and failsafe plans are so crucial to the success of an online business. If your site is down and the reason for the downtime isn't readily apparent, contact your website hosting provider to make sure there isn't a server issue or some other glitch on their end. If it is indeed your website host that is the issue, put your failsafe backup hosting into place.

Is It a Firewall Issue?

If the server that your site is hosted on has a firewall, your connection or your website monitoring service's connection to the server may have been blocked. This could be caused by multiple failed login attempts or unauthorized access to password-protected areas of your website. If this is the case, you will need to contact your hosting provider to fix the issue and remove the block.

Check for DNS Issues

If your hosting server is fine and your site itself isn't having any issues, the downtime may be a result of DNS issues. Make sure your DNS servers are working properly and if they aren't, consider putting backup DNS services into play. Just make sure you get backup DNS service prior to an issue occurring. You don't want to be scrambling to get the service you need to fix an issue when the issue is occurring. This should also be a part of your failsafe plan so you can turn to this fix if it is needed.

Check for Bugs in Updates and Software

If you updated your site, added a feature, or changed the parameters of some of your site's software prior to the outage, you may want to roll your site back to your saved settings (you should always perform a backup before performing any website updates) until you can figure out where the issue lays. One you figure out what is causing the problem, you can fix the bug and then re-launch the new version of your website.

While this is not a be-all, end-all list of the things that could make your site go down, these are common causes of website downtime. When troubleshooting downtime, your website monitoring service can help you determine the exact cause, but the above troubleshooting tips can also help you determine why your site went down and what you need to do to get it back up and running promptly, minimizing any damage the downtime might cause.