Having your site go down is going to be an unpleasant experience for anyone. However, instead of stressing about it, there are steps you can take to make sure that you get out of the situation with minimal damage.
Notify Internal Team
It’s important to first make sure that you tell your team that there’s an outage and that people are troubleshooting it right now. That way, you don’t create a lot of extra problems while other parts of the team think it’s something that they did.
The last thing you want is for many multiple people to all be trying to fix problems that don’t exist simultaneously, with only a few of them actually focused on the real issue. Plus, if people aren’t informed of the outage, they could actually work at cross purposes against each other.
Informing everyone immediately of what’s happening will ensure that everyone is on the same page and no one wastes time or effort on something that won’t help or that will be currently useless. After all, if employees don’t know there’s an outage, they may keep acting as if there isn’t one.
Check for Code Update Releases
The problem could be coming from an update or something related, so it’s important to check for this before doing anything else since it could be an easy fix.
Check for Traffic Spikes
It also helps to see if a traffic spike is causing a slow down or outage. It also helps to look at the traffic analytics right before the outage happened. If you do this, then you could narrow down where the problem is coming from quickly,
Check Hosting Provider
The outage problem could be coming from the hosting provider. There may be a limitation on how much you can do at the moment if it’s coming from the host, except to interface with them and try to figure out what to expect from there or if anything else can be done.
Check Server Logs
Going into the server logs to take a look at events is often an effective way to get a clue about what might have happened. One of the events there is likely related to what caused the outage to occur.
Continue To Isolate and Work on the Problem
If you are still having trouble locating what the issue is, there are more possibilities that include-
Site Parked Errors
You may need to make sure that your domain is pointing to the right place. There are various events that could cause this to no longer be the case. You could also have updated products that have your hosting provider pointing to the wrong place. There could be a mistake in your DNS.
The hosting you bought from a provider may be expired.
If you have this kind of error or one that mentions that there’s a site that isn’t set up here, then it’s worth checking into DNS errors in general, or errors with the domain registrar.
Reaching the Site Errors
If you get an error about the site not being reached, then there could be various reasons why this is the case.
For example, there could be a problem with your ISP. Sometimes internet providers actually route web traffic incorrectly.
Sometimes a large DNS server could be down. A DDoS attack could cause this, for example. This kind of error could also occur because your DNS isn’t pointing to the right IP address. This error could also occur because of an expired domain, just like some of the other errors.
You’re Getting Half a Website or a Blank Page
If your website just shows as completely blank, or if there’s just a handful of basic elements up, then this points to your CMS. Sites that use WordPress could have this problem, for example. However, it could also affect Joomla or just about any other CMS.
A plugin problem could cause it, especially if you need an update. There could also be compatibility issues with the plugins. Sometimes plugins can be deactivated one way or another as well. They could also be unlicensed, and this could cause the issue.
Server Errors
If you’re getting one of those “500 internal server error” type messages, it means that something is likely going wrong after your site is pointing to the correct location. This could occur because of hosting errors, for example.
If you’ve been tinkering with your FTP, you may have changed file and folder permissions.
Errors About Security
If you have a “connection not secure” or “not private” error, then this could lead to an issue with your SSL not working properly. You can try the site without the “S” in “HTTP” to see if that works. If it doesn’t, then your secure socket layers could be expired, or there could be an issue with how it was originally set up initially.
Others
If your site isn’t fully down but is loading poorly, then this could point to a CDN error, a possible hack, a redirect loop, or some other issue that’s slowing everything down.
Avoiding the Problem Altogether
One option you can use instead is to use a team like Ndevr that can help you avoid any of these problems in the first place or help you troubleshoot them quickly if they do occur. That way, you can focus on your site and what you do as a business.
Every second that you spend trying to fix an outage or a situation where the site isn’t working properly is one where you may be losing business. It can also hurt your brand reliability.
Ndevr has experts with over 15 years of experience just from each lead engineer. They’ve been through these kinds of problems many times before.
For more information about how you can avoid having to troubleshoot outages all by yourself, please don’t hesitate to go ahead and contact us today. The faster you contact us, the faster we can help you increase your uptime and handle outages efficiently.
