Almost everyone understands what website downtime is, and everyone who operates an online business understands that downtime equals lost income and, in many cases, a negative impact on a company’s reputation. This is why so many online business owners strive to keep their sites up and operating at all times, avoiding the dreaded website downtime that is unavoidable at times. While website downtime is unavoidable, that doesn’t mean you have to roll with the punches and suffer financial consequences. You may take steps to reduce the amount of downtime your website experiences, and one of these steps is to become aware with the issues that can cause website downtime. One factor that will impair your website’s uptime is server downtime. What exactly is server downtime, and how can you avoid it?
What is the definition of server downtime?
Your website is stored on a server that is owned and maintained by the company that you choose to host your website with, whether you have a shared hosting plan or a dedicated hosting plan. Your site will be unavailable if there is a problem with that server or if it goes down for any reason. This is referred to as “server downtime.” There is nothing you can do to get that server back up and running because the fault is with the server, not a programming error on your end. If you don’t know how to deal with server outages, you’ll have to rely on your website hosting company to get your site back up and running. However, if you plan ahead and strategize for things like server downtime, you can reduce the impact on your website and revenues.
How to Deal with Server Outages
First and foremost, you must ensure that your website is being monitored properly. Your website and the server it is hosted on will be monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year if you use a good website monitoring service. If your hosting provider’s server goes down, your website monitoring service will notify you right away, and you’ll know why your site suddenly went dark. Then you can focus on minimising the harm until your hosting company restores your site’s functionality.
Your Back-up Plan
You can activate your failsafe strategy once you’ve determined that your site is experiencing outage due to a server issue. This does, however, imply that you should start with a failsafe strategy. That implies having backup hosting in place so you can forward your DNS to it until the server problem is fixed. In order for this type of plan to work, you’ll need a DNS provider and a backup hosting provider with near-instant TTL (time to live) times. If your TTL is more than 24 hours, your hosting provider is likely to fix the problem before your site becomes live on the backup hosting provider’s servers. When you can redirect your DNS and have it go live nearly instantaneously, an outage that could last hours or days can be resolved in under an hour, saving your business money and restoring consumer confidence.
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Remember that server downtime is unavoidable because the uptime of the server where your site is housed is determined by your hosting provider’s actions. What you can do is make sure you have a plan in place to get your site back up and running as quickly as possible while your primary web provider resolves the server difficulties.