There’s nothing more stressful than realizing that your site has been offline for the past two hours while you were blissfully unaware.
Whether you’re running a blog, an online store, or a software platform, hosting downtime is a serious issue. Let’s break down the key lessons that we learn the hard way.
Why Does Downtime Happen?
A site can go offline or down for several reasons. The most common ones are:
- Server issues.
- Platform or system issues.
- Planned downtime by your hosting provider.
Most users wait for only a few seconds before bouncing off a website that doesn’t load. So, it’s crucial that you choose a provider that guarantees reasonable uptime and good performance.
Unplanned downtime is when you start losing things.
Downtime Costs Both Money and Trust
If your website is your business or where you earn from, then every second of downtime is literally costing you money.
Even if you’re not selling directly, being offline means:
- Users can’t access your content.
- Search engines see your site as unreliable.
- You look unprofessional and untrustworthy, especially to first-time visitors.
And if downtime keeps happening more than once, your potential customers will stop coming back.
Cheap Hosting Leads to Expensive Problems
Shared hosting might look tempting when you’re starting out. The cheap deals even sound like a steal. But the money you save from it will all be used up when your site goes down during a traffic spike or a routine update.
This cheap service space is being shared between you and multiple other users. Which is why it’s better to switch to VPS plans that give you private servers that don’t need to be shared.
Sure, the latter costs more, but if you look at it long-term, a VPS plan is far cheaper than one that would require more money down the road. Providers like Liquid Web promise good performance and 99.99% uptime, so you can rest assured you’re not losing any customers or money.
It Affects Your Ranking
Search engines like Google work by crawling and indexing a published site and ranking it based on certain factors. A high ranking means your site appears before the others when a user looks for a certain term or keyword.
When your site is down, the crawlers can’t access the content on it. You also lose organic traffic. This can compromise your ranking and might even get you deindexed.
Support Response Time Matters
Imagine you open your site just to see how things are at 3 AM. The first thing you see? It fails to load. So, you quickly message your hosting support… but they don’t reply.
If your hosting provider doesn’t offer 24/7 human support, it’s time to consider someone else. VPS providers usually cater to more serious users, which means offering faster and quality support when you need it.
Final Thoughts
If you’ve already learned these lessons the hard way or want to avoid learning them at all, then do your research and go with a proper hosting plan and provider.
That way, you can get more control, better performance, stronger security, and most of all, fewer downtimes.
