Website down: understand the causes and learn how to solve

The problem affects even large companies such as Lojas Americanas and Submarino and may be related to your hosting provider.

If you’ve already experienced this feeling and still don’t know how to solve it, we’ve separated a series of simple measures for you to perform when your website is offline.

Keep reading and find out!

How to find out if a website is down?

There are a few ways to tell if a site is, in fact, offline or if there is some other factor preventing your page from loading.

To identify an offline site, you can perform the following steps:

Check your internet connection

Sometimes a website doesn’t load completely due to problems with our connection.

So before anything else, make sure the problem is not with your network.

To do this, try to open other pages and check your modem, following the procedures guided by your operator.

In addition, you can also try to access it from your smartphone, discarding your wifi and trying to use your mobile data.

Use external tools

You can also rely on the help of external scanning tools to identify a website that is down.

In addition to being free, they are easy to use, just type your domain address in the search field.

Here are the best ones for you:

Off air
Down Detector
Is it Down Right Now
Down for Everyone or Just Me

Access the hosting control panel

If you want to identify the problem at the source, we advise you to access the hosting control panel.

Most servers provide important information for monitoring the availability of pages, such as memory usage, CPU, and execution processes.

See if the problem is your IP

If your website is active but you can’t access it, it could be that your IP address is blocked.

For security reasons, IP addresses may be temporarily blocked by the server’s firewall.

To resolve the blocked IP issue, you will have to contact your hosting provider’s support.

Website down: what are the most common causes and how to solve them?

The first thing to do when your site is down is to find the cause. Therefore, we have listed the main reasons why your site is inactive. Check out:

Server error

Problems with configuration or adjustments in your hosting environment can lead to server errors, and, consequently, the site is down.

This can happen for several reasons, like a misspelled file, for example. Thus, it is common to see the error message 500.

Domain expired

As you may already know, registering a domain is one of the main steps to getting a website up and running and ensuring that the web address is yours alone.

However, domain registration has a deadline, which, when expired, can take your site offline.

The cycle can be monthly, semi-annual or annual. Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention and make the renewal in the correct period.

Therefore, it is important to have the means to check if it is time to renew your domain and make the payment as soon as possible in the event of an expiration.

Wait for DNS propagation

If a domain’s DNS or name server configuration has changed, for example during a site transfer, you need to wait for DNS propagation.

That way, if your site is down, it’s very likely that the propagation hasn’t been completed yet. The time required varies between 48 and 72 hours.

Suspended account

Websites can be suspended for a variety of reasons, most of the time it’s because you haven’t renewed your hosting service.

If your account has been suspended your site will be unavailable and if you try to access it you will be directed to an error message like the one in the image above.

Excessive use of server resources

Before hiring a hosting service, you need to assess whether the resources offered by the server in the chosen plan will be enough to meet your demand.

Sites with a lot of hits, or sudden spikes at certain times of the year, such as black friday , for example, tend to overload servers.

This is very common, especially on shared hosting , which has usage limits.

You can identify this cause through the error message “no response from server” or error 508.

Redirect loop

Multiple URL redirects can take a site down.

This happens because the browser may not understand the command and, consequently, not load your page.

So, to make sure that the cause of a down site is not a redirect loop, try accessing it from another browser.

Programming errors

Errors in website programming can lead to its downfall, especially on pages that use the PHP language.

This can cause some (or all) of the pages on your site to not load properly.

So, to find out if this is what happened, investigate whether there have been any recent changes to your site’s code.

How to prevent a website from going offline frequently?

Your website is the face of your business and a crucial touchpoint in the buyer’s journey, and downtime issues can tarnish your reputation, make your customers angry, and make you lose money.

While some interruptions are normal, unexpected and regular episodes are not.

No hosting provider can guarantee 100% uptime.

Even sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have rare periods of site downtime.

So, if you are already tired of dealing with the problems related to a website down, it is necessary to take some measures and anticipate the problem.

Maybe it’s time to change servers and hire a plan that really meets your traffic demand and makes your site available 24 hours a day, even at peak times.