Of course, it is important for every website owner to be sure that the resource is up and running – both its rating in search engines and simply the attitude of users depend on it directly. For this, a website owner usually hires the webmaster, whose task is to provide all of the above. That is, the task of the webmaster is literally constant monitoring of the website’s performance and elimination of problems as soon as possible. Without this, you cannot go anywhere in the age of Internet technologies.
Common website problems
When an error occurs on your website, there can be many consequences. If you’re not careful, a web bug can crash your business. That’s why it’s important to know how to fix various web errors as fast as possible. It is essential to get your website back online quickly. And this is especially vital in terms of getting traffic from search engines’ optimisation.
HTTP Errors
HTTP errors are literally most common on the Internet. They are related to the failure of the software server for some reason. There are many of them, and each has its own characteristics that need to be addressed. However, a simple list of browser errors will be a super simple guide about these errors and ways to fix them.
Server-side problems
All non-personal servers host multiple domains, It means that you will have more than one configuration file. And the server software manages all of them. If you remove one of these, you may have a problem with the leftover configuration file that is causing the problem. It is also common for a web page error to occur when there are other configuration problems like undeleted files related to redirects.
Faulty CDN server
Content Delivery Networks (CDN) are one of the common ways for website owners and webmasters to speed up website loading. Customers don’t want to wait a few seconds for a web page to load and often leave before they do. Occasionally a problem may arise in the content delivery network that will cause the web page to crash. But you won’t have anything specific about occuring troubles, which is why they are so difficult to detect and solve.
CDN misconfiguration problems
One more CDN-related problem is in its configuration sequence. It becomes a real trouble when the web-server receives updates, and CDN does not. This means that the CDN was configured in the wrong way. And it leads to various issues down to the complete website inaccessibility.
Security issues and DDoS
Website security is important, and when a website lacks it, it will have troubles. DDoS (Denial of Service) is one of those troubles, despite it’s not always related to security issues. And DDoS can also be an issue for your server configuration. but it can be a serious issue for your server configuration. There could also be an influx of traffic because of viruses. Or it can happen when someone literally attacks your website using spam requests en masse.
An effective way to efficient website monitoring
To keep a constant hand on the pulse of stability of your website, it is not necessary to spend sleepless nights tracking its status. Moreover, even the most attentive webmaster will not be able to monitor the website around the clock. But this task perfectly copes with special services, such as HostTracker, which has proven itself as a reliable helper.
The main purpose of this system is to promptly notify the website owner or webmaster in case of problems. This is necessary so that the webmaster can fix these problems quickly. Thus, the main emphasis is placed on responsiveness. But just as important is the right recognition of truly critical situations.
It is for this purpose that all HostTracker divides alerts into several categories, according to their degree of importance. If the failure is of short duration, the system will not send notification. However, in the case of real problems, the system will promptly report to the webmaster. This allows the specialist to know about the problems if they last for a long time.
Notification methods and settings
Free methods of communication such as email, Hangouts, Skype, Telegram are preferred. Only if necessary, does the system send notifications by SMS, Viber or phone call. In addition, the webmaster can regulate the working hours for each means of communication. The system is designed so that it will send a minimum of false alarms and people responsible for the website. Thus they will not get lost in the flow of information. And in the case of serious problems those people will learn about them as quickly as possible.
And a variety of settings allow you to clearly assign roles in responsibility for the website and receive notifications only when there are real problems. Setting the “working hours” parameter also comes in handy when there are two resource administrators. So that the person who is currently on shift will receive notifications.
As an example configuration, let’s assume that the administrator and webmaster are responsible for the website. Immediately after the shutdown of the website, the system will send notification to the webmaster’s email. If the website is down and after a quarter of an hour, the webmaster will get an SMS-notification. If the situation does not change over an hour, the system will send an SMS to the administrator.
Google Ads monitoring solution
Taking into account how high are advertising prices today, every website owner always wants to be sure of its effectiveness. And if for some reason the website becomes unavailable, the Google Ads system completely blocks all of your advertising campaigns. The reason for inaccessibility is of no particular importance for this contextual advertising service. And the website owner can only manually restore it. But that’s not the worst thing.
A large number of outages and errors on a website connected to Adwords go unnoticed by Google systems. And it places links to inaccessible websites in ad units, so users click on empty links. Moreover, even a short-term failure can stop an ad campaign for a long period. After all, even if the website owner can localize the problem in time, he will have to make a request to restore the subscription and wait for it to be completed.
But the HostTracker toolkit includes a service that automatically checks the status of the website. And it manually pauses advertising campaigns through the Adwords API before Google takes any action. And as soon as the website is back to normal, the service resumes the campaign. This approach allows website owners to avoid serious financial losses, minimizes the consequences of failures and significantly reduces the load on the webmaster or technical team.
