Imagine this:

Your big publicity moment arrives. You launched a new product and got the word out via your email lists, interviews, social media and press releases. Your phone has been ringing all day and your business email is full of inquiries. This attention is exactly what your business needs! Until you get that one call (or email) that every business owner dreads; your website has crashed and it can’t be accessed by users.

While the good news is, you’re not the first business this has happened to and you certainly won’t be the last because really, every website crashes. Facebook, Twitter, Tech Crunch crashes. Google, Gizmodo, and GoDaddy have all gone down.  Their data misplaced but eventually was found. It might be very brief or even while you sleep, but the reality is every website crashes and yours might too.

There are endless reasons why a website could go down.  There could be a problem in the website’s code.  There could be a problem with the server. It could be due to an increased volume of traffic, or due to network configuration issues or natural disasters causing troubles to your data center. To avoid these, we listed out a couple of things you can do to avoid your website crashing and damage control tips to help when or (if) it does.

How To Prevent Your Website From Crashing

• Use A Content Delivery Network (CDN). CDNs are cloud-based data services that help to optimize delivery of every type of content from text and images to data-heavy things like software and videos. It also delivers cached static content from websites to users based on the geographic location of the user. CDN distributes the load to multiple servers instead of letting your main server take the entire traffic thus making it less likely to crash.

• Keep Frequent Backup of the website’s files, including all databases being used. If the site crashes, having a recent backup will ensure the site content will remain current.

• Keep All Website Software Up To Date with their latest versions. Sometimes bugs or security holes are left in older versions which can cause a website to crash unexpectedly.

• Regularly Check Your Server. Ensure that you don’t have basic data caps (limit the capacity of data transfer to and from a website) in place with your website host. While this normally wouldn’t present an issue for regular usage, sites that expect to come under heavy traffic should manually request removal of the caps. It is also important to choose the right host and the hosting plan with a fast processor, lot of RAM, a fast storage device, SSD and high bandwidth.

Damage Control ‘If’ The Website Crashes

• Contact The Web Hosting Company, they may be experiencing problems. So get in touch with their support team directly and find out what the problem is and what can be done to resolve it.

• Find Out The Root Cause Of The Crash: Finding out the root cause of the crash can help in sorting the problem and getting your website back up and running.

• Use Another Outlet To Communicate With Your Clients and take responsibility for the outage. Let them know that you understand their frustrations and you are working hard to resolve the outage. It is important that you don’t hide.

• Stop Marketing Campaigns: Advertising online when your website has crashed is not just going to waste your advertising budget but also creates a bad reputation when users click on the ad just to see a crashed website. Hold the pause button when it comes to online advertising when your website has crashed.

• Contact Us: If you’re one of our clients, contact us; that’s what we’re here for. If you’re not one of our clients, well, Still Contact us, we would be happy to help.

.