Having a website is important for many individuals and businesses alike. Some people have a site for sharing information, selling a product or marketing a service. While it would be great if all of these sites were always up, that isn’t always the case. It is common for websites to crash due to a number of issues such as server problems or too much traffic.
Site crashes can unfortunately lead to a lot of downtime, which can be very detrimental to a website or business. In fact, Amazon had one hour of downtime back in July 2018 and it reportedly cost them around $100 million in lost sales.
With all of that in mind, it is very important to ensure your site is stable and remains online. This article is going to look at a few tips to help you ensure your site is as stable as possible.
Be Prepared and Test Often
The best ways to ensure your site is stable is to prepare it. This involves performing a lot of different tests. You should schedule frequent load tests to ensure your site can handle a lot of traffic. If you encounter weaknesses or your site crashes, you should make some changes to make it more stable.
Also, in addition to testing and running simulations to test the stability, also look into software or services that can help. Some services can offer incidence response and resolution to quickly identify and help fix any issues or errors your site might encounter. Learning about this and utilizing it can help you prepare for any possible issues.
Use a Content Delivery Network
If your website isn’t already using a content delivery network or system, it is about time that you start. They are cloud-based services that can scale themselves automatically to optimize the delivery of content on your site. This will make videos run easily and quickly while ensuring all content loads quickly, no matter how much traffic you have.
The absolute last thing you want when you get a sudden spike in visitors is for them not to be able to access certain parts of your site. Using a content delivery network will ensure that your site will always be able to handle its traffic, even during unpredictable traffic periods. These services can often be had at an affordable price, so there is no reason not to consider them.
Back-up Frequently
One of the worst things about site crashes is that they are unpredictable and you never truly know when they happen. Because of this, it’s a good idea to use backups to ensure that the data and content on your site will be saved even if a crash occurs.
While you could opt to manually back up these files, it is often a better idea to automatically back them up to the cloud. This will ensure all of your hard work will be safe. While crashes are hopefully uncommon on your site, having backups is always a good plan.
Keep Software Updated Often
Your site or company is likely using a lot of different software, and you need to ensure that it is always being updated. Software manufacturers regularly release updates so keep your eyes open for them every few weeks or months.
Outdated software can leave potential holes that hackers can use to get into your website. They can do a lot of damage there from stealing information, to deleting content or a variety of other things. Hacks and data breaches cost companies a ton of money, as well as the trust of their visitors or customers.
In conclusion, hopefully this article has been able to help you keep your site stable and crash-free.
