A website can appear to be offline for multiple reasons. Read on to find out how to find out if your website is actually down and what the cause may be.
Downtime can be harmful to your website for various reasons. To start with, if your website is down it can lead to a huge drop in sales. But it can also be very detrimental to your brand image, for both first-time visitors and the regular ones, who might not have the patience to wait and might go to a competitor’s website instead.
Is your website offline?
First of all, it is important to determine that the website is, in fact, down for everybody and not just you.
To make sure it is, try accessing the website on a different computer, phone or any other device. Also, check there are no issues with your broadband connection by trying to open a different website. Sites such as Where’s It Up? or Down for Everyone or Just Me? can also help you confirm whether your website is down just for you or for everyone.
UpTime Monitoring
If your website is hosted with Patrick Internet, you can sign up to our free UpTime Monitoring Lite service, that notifies you by email, whenever an issue arises. UpTime Monitoring will inform you if one of your online services has failed. Once added to your account, you can choose one of these monitoring protocols:
- HTTP: Web server
- IMAP: Internet message access
- POP3: Email server
- SMTP: Outgoing email server
- SSL: Secure socket layer
- DNS: Domain name system
- FTP: File Transfer Protocol
- HTTPS: Secure Web Server
- MYSQL: MySQL Databases
- TCP: Custom Ports
- PINGS: Sends an echo command to the target host/device, helping you to verify IP Level Connectivity, useful for hosts as well as for devices like routers and firewalls
- URL: Website monitoring
- Keyword Monitoring: Alert when keyword (exists/doesn’t exist) on URL with include username/password authentication
- Spam Blacklist: Check Service Checks IP/Hostname address with Spam Blacklists
- HTTP Header Status
Why do websites go down?
If your website is actually offline, it can be due to various reasons. You can follow these steps to find out what the cause may be:
Server issues
If a website has actually gone down, it is essential to check whether it is an issue with the server, as this is one of the most common problems.
Try to load the site again and look at the status bar at the bottom of your browser. This can give you a hint of whether or not it is a server error, as the status bar might not be able to show the “Done” status code.
You can also run a Ping command to check that the server is okay:
- On a Mac, you can do this from Applications > Utilities and run terminal
- On Windows, click Start and type “cmd”
Then write the following command, changing the URL to the one you want to check:
C:> ping www.nameofwebsite.com
If the server is working correctly, then you will get a response from the IP address of the URL with the loading time of the website on your computer.
However, if nothing happens when you ping, or the command times out, the server might have crashed.
If your server has a control panel such as Plesk, you can try logging in to make sure the server is running. There, you can check whether your server has run out of space, or memory, or if something has crashed.
Networking issue
If it is not a problem with the server, it could also be a networking issue. To find out, you can use the trace option on a website such as network-tools.com.
If you find an issue with the network you can contact your hosting company, who will have the ability to fix the network and/or restart the server.
Programming error
If the problem is not the server or network, then it is likely there is a programming error or misconfiguration on your website. For instance, if you have a WordPress site, you need to be careful with your themes and plugins. Make sure they are all compatible with your WordPress version and the technology your web host uses.
You also need to be careful when you make any changes to your website, as upgrades or new installations can sometimes cause glitches. Make sure you have regular automatic backups in place and that you use staging environments to test out the site when you are making changes.
Hacking or malware
Although hackers used to be more interested in bigger companies, they now seem to have decided that smaller businesses can also be a profitable target.
Patrick Internet automatic malware scanning
At Patrick Internet, we scan every website daily, on our WordPress, Linux and Windows hosting platforms, for common malware infections. Using commercial tools and in-house systems, we discover all sorts of malicious code. Malware, such as web shells or mail/spam daemons, can compromise your data, giving criminal entities, access to your website’s data, email and content.
If you think that your website might have been hacked, log into your control panel to view the malware report for your files. At Patrick Internet, we offer monitoring capabilities in our client area, so if your website is hosted with us, you will always know what is happening to your site at all times. Find out more about our hosting solutions here.
