CommonWebsite Downtime Causes & How Monitoring Detects Them Early
Downtime of a website is the nightmare of every business owner. No matter if you are operating an eCommerce store, a SaaS platform, a blog, or a corporate website, a few minutes of downtime can cause revenue loss, a drop in trust, and angry users. The most troubling part?
CommonWebsite Downtime Causes & How Monitoring Detects Them Early Downtime of a website is the nightmare of every business owner. No matter if you are operating an eCommerce store, a SaaS platform, a blog, or a corporate website, a few minutes of downtime can cause revenue loss, a drop in trust, and angry users. Majority of downtime problems do not arise suddenly. They start as small issues—slow response times, failed requests, misconfigured servers—and if they are left without an attention, they become major outages. Therefore, website monitoring becomes very important. Here is what we are going to discuss:
● The most common reasons why websites go down ● The effect of each issue on a website ● How website monitoring can detect these problems before they impact your business
What Is Website Downtime? Website downtime means any time when your website is: ● Completely or partially inaccessible ● So slow or full of errors that the user cannot fully interact with the site Downtime can be planned (during maintenance) or unplanned (due to mistakes, attacks, or breakdowns). Unplanned downtime is the one that causes the most harm.
Why Early Downtime Detection Matters If a downtime situation is recognized right away, then: ● ● ● ●
Issues are fixed before customers even notice them The period of loss of revenue is shortened The brand reputation is preserved Complying with SLA is ensured
Most website owners without monitoring learn about downtime only when customers complain and by that time it is already too late.
1. Server Overload & Resource Exhaustion What Happens? Server overload is bound to happen if your server runs out of: ● ● ● ●
processing power (CPU) memory (RAM) disk space bandwidth
…and at that point, it will be unable to respond to the new incoming requests. Common causes: Tension during traffic spikes or launch of marketing campaigns and poor server optimization.
Impact ● Very slow loading of pages ● 503 Service Unavailable errors appearing on the screen ● Site crashing completely
How Monitoring Detects It Early Website monitoring software keeps track of: ● Changes in server response times ● Server responsiveness (Time to First Byte) ● Server uptime When time taken to respond is quite long, monitoring software alerts the site owners in advance so that they can increase the capacity or do optimizations and thus avoid full outage situations.
2. Hosting Provider Failures What Happens? No matter how reliable a hosting provider is, they can still experience: ● ● ● ●
Data center outages Network issues Power failures Errors during maintenance
Impact ● You cannot get to the website ● Services like email, APIs, and dashboards stop functioning
How Monitoring Detects It Early By monitoring the website from multiple locations globally, your site is tested for availability worldwide. If the results show that it is down from different places almost simultaneously, the monitoring system can fairly determine that it is a major outage, not just a local sporadic issue. Your hosting provider can send you a status notification eventually but monitoring is still likely to alert you quicker than the provider.
3. DNS Issues & Misconfiguration What Happens? Your DNS (Domain Name System) is at work each time you type your domain name, translating it to the server IP. Some situations that cause downtime are: ● DNS records getting changed wrongly ● Nameservers issues
● DNS propagation problems ● DNS service provider going down
Impact ● Your site will be unavailable for load ● There will be lots of errors like “DNS server not responding” ● Emails will no longer work
How Monitoring Detects It Early DNS monitoring keeps an eye on: ● How long does the DNS request take ● Are the nameservers up and running ● Any changes to the DNS records In case there is a slowdown or total failure of DNS resolution, you get the warning from the monitoring system even before the users realize that the website cannot be accessed.
4. SSL Certificate Expiry What Happens? In case the SSL certificates are not renewed in time, they will expire. Subsequent to this, the browsers: ● Throw up security warnings ● Refuse HTTPS connections ● Users are not allowed to get to the pages
Impact ● Users no longer have confidence in your site ● Your SEO ranking suffers ● Your website gets abandoned more frequently
How Monitoring Detects It Early SSL monitoring makes sure to: ● Check if the certificate has not expired ● Verify the expiration date ● Look for certificate chain problems You are reminded a few days or weeks before your certificate expires so that you can have enough time to renew it and, therefore, avoid your site going down.
5. Software Updates & Code Errors What Happens? Most crashes happen right after: ● The CMS (WordPress, plugins, themes) is updated ● The server software is upgraded ● The new version of the code is deployed Even a tiny fault can cause the break down of the entire website.
Impact ● The dreaded white screen of death ● Pages showing broken content ● Internal server error (500)
How Monitoring Detects It Early Site monitoring allows: ● Checking the website at set intervals (for example, one minute or even faster) ● Checking the website right after the update has been deployed By doing that, you receive an alert if anything goes wrong and as such a quick rollback or fix is possible.
6. Database Failures What Happens? Various reasons such as: ● ● ● ●
Corrupted data Unnecessarily long-running queries Connection problems Disk issues
Impact ● Inability to load dynamic pages ● Hack prevention system failure ● The possibility of losing the data
How Monitoring Detects It Early
The monitoring of a website can reveal: ● HTTP response failures ● Effect of the issue on response times ● Error codes related to databases So the developer can look into it before it get totally out of hand.
7. Traffic Spikes & DDoS Attacks What Happens? Traffic spikes may be the result of: ● The users visiting your site are genuine and coming for the sales, promotions, or because the content went viral ● Cyber attackers out to sabotage your website (DDoS attacks) A server overload is a common problem for both scenarios.
Impact ● Either the website keeps loading slowly or it does not load at all ● Users are unable to complete the purchases ● The service is interrupted
How Monitoring Detects It Early Monitoring has the ability to pick up: ● Huge drops in the performance ● Error of the type time-out ● Some responses that are not usual By combining this data with traffic and uptime information you can promptly figure out that an attack is going on and take steps accordingly.
8. Network & Connectivity Issues What Happens? Some places where things can go wrong: ● ● ● ●
ISP services CDN networks Routing paths Firewalls
…may keep your users away from your site.
Impact ● If you try to access the site the page loads only in certain regions but not in others ● You encounter partial downtime ● You experience inconsistency in the performance
How Monitoring Detects It Early Global monitoring is able to perform checks from different countries and networks. In case there are problems occurring only in a specific region, you will be given an alert with the data on the location so that you can pinpoint the problem and resolve it quickly.
9. Third-Party Service Failures What Happens? Modern websites depend heavily on: ● ● ● ● ●
Payment gateways APIs Analytics tools Chat widgets External scripts
Once a third-party service goes down, your site can be broken.
Impact ● Your customers have trouble checking out ● The functionalities of your site become broken ● An unusually long loading time of the pages
