No business ever wants their website to go down, but it is a common occurrence, and as such, your IT department needs to be prepared for it. There are several steps that can be taken to ensure that any interruption to website accessibility – and any data stored on your server – is properly handled.

Don’t Panic

 
Staying calm is the most important thing any IT department can do when issues with the company website occur. Objectivity is the key to resolving this kind of issue, and the first step is to eliminate the obvious causes of site inaccessibility, such as a poor Wi-Fi signal. Different solutions can be attempted, such as seeing if you can connect to other websites, before going into defensive mode.

Recent Changes

If your company recently made changes to any aspect of its website or updated its information in some way, this may be the culprit. You can attempt to load the website to see if it connects right away. If it only displays a blank page and continuously attempts to connect, a problem with the software used to create and edit your website is likely. It can also indicate coding issues, as well as problems with any software used to create the code.

 
It may be that updates to the coding software need to be made, or that the company in charge of your website management is having their own issues. In the case of the latter, it may be a good idea to visit their website and see if there is any news related to connection issues at their end.

Try A Roll-back Or Ping

 
You can also try reverting to an older version of the website to see if this solves any issues. If not, it may be a good idea to ping the site’s address to see if it’s a server-side issue, which a ‘timed out’ response will indicate. If you receive a response of ‘unknown host’, your website’s domain is the likely culprit.

Let Them Know

If none of the above seems to work, then the issue may require more time and effort to resolve. In the meantime, if you’ve got a sound internet connection and social media accounts, it is time to let the world know that you are experiencing issues. This is an important task, as it will help your company’s customers be more patient about your efforts to fix the issues.

As well, using social media to announce technical difficulties prevents customers from going through the frustration of trying to access the site on their own without success.

Solutions For Downtime Protection

You can prevent both major outages and short-term downtime by ensuring you’ve got a combination of DNS management, backup hosting and CDN services in place. The CDN service will provide protection against short-term outages, whilst the backup hosting will ensure your site can still be accessible even during downtime. The DNS management arm will automatically reroute traffic to your secondary host when it detects that your website is down.

Another way to protect your site from the damaging effects of downtime is to ensure that your database is always backed up before any modifications to site code are made.

Regardless of the type of protection you choose, there should always be a means of protecting the integrity of your data. Without this, your website and data protection strategy is incomplete. Absolute IT offers a wide range of services designed for the purposes of data protection.

From IT asset disposal to supply chain security, our team of experts knows how to handle your data safely and securely. Our provision of detailed asset reports following the disposal of assets and the data they contain ensures that you always have an audit trail for your records and peace of mind.