Keep Your Website Online. Ways to solve server problems.

Website and server problems

It happens, that servers fail. This causes, that a website is offline. This doesn't happen often. But it happens. With free webhosts it seems to happen more often. And free domain name registrars seem to have a higher failure rate too.

There are ways to make more sure that the website stays online when the webhost and the domain registrar face a problem with the server.

Lets suppose the website is offline. Here are some solutions.

The first step is to change to another webhost immediately.

A free website of a free webhost can be up in 15 minutes. The time to get a website of a paid webhost depends of several things. It is possible that the payment for the purchase of a paid website from a paid webhost has to arrive first at the bank account of the webhost before the order of a website space is accepted. If this is the case it depends from the time the bank transfer takes to know how long it takes to get a new website. It seems the orders at Xisto - Support are accepted and managed manually. This means it can take several days before a new webspace is available.

It is faster to open a new website than to wait for the webhost to solve the server problem. The solution to open a new website is in the hand of the website owner. The solution of the server problem is something the webhost has to do. The website owner can't influence this activity very much.

Another option is to order a second website space in advance like a spare website space. When a problem occurs with the first website the domain name can be changed to the second website.

A domain name can point to a website by using URL forwarding. A change works immediately. The change of domain name servers can take 30 minutes till 48 hours.

Another option is to have a welcome webpage. The main webpage can be reached by clicking on a link on the welcome webpage. It is possible to host the welcome webpage and the main webpage at different webhosts. When the main page is offline the link on the welcome page to the spare main page can be changed in five minutes.

It seems to be handy to have a different domain name registrar that is not the webhost. When the website and the service of the domain name registrar face problems the website and the service of the webhost are probably still online and running.

An option is to have a spare webdomain name and a second website at different name registrars and different webhosts. This makes it possible to switch the moment a problem is seen.

It seems that there is not much information available about solutions to solve server problems and to make sure a website stays online. The damage of a website that is offline can be big. A webshop looses income when the webshop is offline. A company that gets his customers online looses new customers when the customers can't see the website. This means that the costs of a second domain name and a second webhost account and webspace can be less high compared to the loss a website that is offline can cause.

Another way is to carefully choose your webhost supplier.Huge companies have workarounds in case a server fails.If the physical server hosting your website fails, they are able to move your site to another physical device and restart your website services in a very short time. Then they have plenty of time for repairing the faulty hardware, your website being still online on the temporary hardware.

which also comes down to reliability... and as yordan mentioned, bigger hosting companies tend to have much more reliable and immediate failure responses than smaller and free ones (in general)...astahost hosting service is quite reliable and it's FREE but then ofcourse most site owners and designers would pick a hosting service depending on the contents of the site, with a non-commercial, personal sites FREE hosting is most likely sufficient... for commercial ones a paid hosting would be most appropriate