An annoying scenario for a website owner, you check how your website is doing and find out that it is simply unreachable, or even worse, one of your customers reports that your website is offline! How can this be? Where is the problem? Discover in this blog article the most common reasons why your website has gone offline.
Your internet connection has dropped
In your eyes maybe a trivial reason, but always check this first before looking for other causes, it happens often enough ;-) You can simply do this by surfing to other websites. Are these also not reachable? Then the problem probably lies with your internet connection.
The server is unreachable
Server overload
Your internet connection is working fine, maybe we should take a look at the server. Do you perhaps have a shared hosting package, where other websites also use your server? Then another website may have caused an overload, oops! In that case we will recommend the other customer to switch to a VPS.
Hacked?
The server your website is running on can also be hacked, this is usually the most feared cause. Why your server is the victim can in turn also have many different reasons. In this blog article we talk more about hacking websites and servers and how best to prevent them.
Badly configured
Has your server perhaps been badly configured by your hosting partner? When for example updates are forgotten or permissions are not set properly, hackers get the chance to sneak in, which can also cause a shutdown. This is therefore related to the previous point.
You have changed your DNS settings
When you make changes to the DNS settings, there is also a chance that your website goes offline for a while, yes, “for a while”. If it has already been going on for several hours, you can safely sound the alarm, then something probably went wrong during the changes. Is it about a migration of your website? Discover how best to prevent disaster scenarios during a migration.
Your deploy procedure is not optimal
Do you always deploy your changes in the best way? If your deploy method is not optimal, it may happen that your code is not updated correctly, or that files are “missing”. As a result, your site may temporarily stop working. So always use a decent and efficient deploy tool, that’s the message!
Too many or incorrect redirects
Furthermore, you may also see the message “This website has a redirect loop” or “This page isn’t working, X redirected you too many times.” Here the problem clearly lies with the redirects you have set up, you may have set up too many or set them up incorrectly, causing a “redirect loop”. This problem can also occur when setting up https (read more about correctly setting up https).
