The Computer Zone

Yesterday Easy C Tutorials experienced a prolonged downtime from about 10:00AM EST to around 4 or 5:00PM and I’d like to apologize to everyone that visited. Media Temple (our hosting service) was extremely quick to fix the problem once they knew about it.

Downtime is a problem that has plagued every blogger at one point or another. Maybe you were changing themes and had to take the site down for a few minutes, or maybe your hosting provider encountered a problem and your site(s) didn’t load for a while (like me). Whatever causes the downtime it can hurt your blogs reputation if it happens often so the question is what can you do to minimize your downtime?

Monitor Your Sites
One of the reasons why you’ll rarely see a large blog/site down for any extended period of time is because they monitor their sites religiously. If their site goes down for any length of time they lose money, simple as that. If you don’t monitor your site how are you supposed to know that it’s running slow? Emails? A friend telling you? Monitoring your site is definitely the quickest way to make sure your site is running properly.

Monitoring your site doesn’t have to mean that you’re on it 24/7. If you have more important things, and unless you’re a professional blogger you probably do, go and do those things and check in from time to time. At a minimum you should be checking your site at least once a day. If theres a problem and it’s lasting longer than a day you’re going to lose a lot of viewers. When a viewer comes to a site and sees that it’s down they often remember and will avoid the site from then on. This is one of the biggest reasons to minimize your sites downtime.

Contact Your Hosting Provider
Once you know that your sites down (or unusually slow), the next thing to do is to contact whoever is hosting your site. Often times it’ll be a problem with the server that they’re using to host your site. When I contacted MediaTemple to tell them about the lagginess of my site they responded very quickly telling me that they were resolving the issue as quick as they could. This kept me calm and I knew that my blog would soon be up. If you don’t contact them however they may not know that there is even a problem. If you’re a paying customer then they’ll most likely be quick to fix it because they want to keep your business.

“I’ve contacted them and they don’t seem to be doing anything to fix the problem” I’ve heard of a few people who ran into this problem, with their hosting provider not really caring about the problem. At this point you have to decide whether the service they provide is worth the downtimes then theres nothing you can do. If it’s not worth it you can threaten to leave if they don’t fix the problem. If they don’t fix the downtime quickly, leave, find a new hosting provider.

Try Other Fixes
If your site is just taking a long time to load (isn’t completely down), try putting a small static index page telling the viewers that your site is currently experiencing technical difficulties and will soon be back up. Hopefully this page will load quicker since it is small and wouldn’t have any PHP (or whatever SSLs you use). This fix really only works if your site is experiencing slow load times. It won’t help if you’re site is totally down.

These are a few things you can do to minimize the amount of downtime your site will see. In the end though everyone experiences downtimes and you just have to deal with it. Hopefully your site will experience downtime as few times as possible.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Blogging, Site Information. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.