There are several factors that can cause website downtime. These unfortunate incidences are usually unexpected and virtually every website owner goes through it from time to time.

It happens to even the best of websites. This is why no web hosting company claims to offer 100% uptime.

One thing is to know the existing threat; another is to know the cause and how to tackle it (click here to learn about what to do when your website goes down).

Website downtime is not always the website owner’s fault.

However, it is unfortunate that some people hire a web developer to design a beautiful and well optimized website, then they practically abandon it without any form of ongoing maintenance.

The result?

Multiple website downtime, bad online reputation, massive loss of sales and bad impression on the part of potential customers.

In order to avoid a situation such as these, it is important for you to know common factors that can cause website downtime.

Below are 3 commonest factors that can cause your website to go down unexpectedly. You should always beware of them.

Poor Maintenance:

Imagine driving a car for a year without maintenance – what do think will happen?

Now most web site owners behave like that.

They don’t usually consider quality maintenance as important until their website begins to malfunction because of old and outdated plugins and scripts.

It is very bad to leave your website uncared for. How do you think it will look when visitors arrive on your website to observe that many links on your website are broken and lead to 404 error pages.

Ongoing steady maintenance can help you discover when something is going wrong with the site. And this forewarning will provide you time to possibly fixed it before it gets worse.

For example, if you review your site’s health regularly, you will discover early if there is a comment spam attack or brute-force attack on your website and then you can stop it before it overloads your server and cause website downtime.

When website accumulates problems – even if the problems were little at the beginning; they can cause your website to shut down. So make sure your site is checked and maintain regularly.

Hackers:

If your website has a loophole in security, a hacker may find his way through into your website cpanel or server and implant a script that can overload your server and cause website downtime.

The easiest route hackers gain access these days is through free scripts, plugins and themes or templates posted in suspicious places online.

So don’t give them such opportunity to strike you because it might be too late before you get hold of your site again.

To Make sure your site is free from any vulnerability to hackers, avoid the use of simple password combination, constant use of one password, connecting to public wifi while working on your site, or even sharing your wifi with people.

(Learn how to secure your website from hackers even if you are a computer novice)

Just avoid anything that can give a hacker access to your website backend (i.e. if you use CMS), server or cPanel.

Cheap Hosting:

In simple terms, avoid $1 shared hosting.

Most times, this will cause frequent website downtime because of inadequate RAM and CPU.

Don’t fall for the hype about unlimited disk space and bandwidth. No hosting provider really provides that.

When you buy cheap shared hosting your website might go down even when it is no fault of yours. This is because when the website of another site owner on the same shared server is affected (e.g. spam overload), your website will also malfunction as well.

And even if your website doesn’t go down completely, it will surely become unresponsive and load slowly. And you will leave potential customers visiting your website (maybe for the first time) with a really bad impression about your business.

In conclusion, having known the 3 commonest factors that can cause website downtime, it is very crucial you set up a quality monitoring software that can easily alert you when your website is down (or you can easily install pingdom on your website). This way you can take action the moment it happens.

And as a last note, always backup all your web files because your site might still go down even after you chosen the best hosting company, secured your site from hackers and hired a top-notch full service digital marketing agency to maintain your website.

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