Every webmaster knows the feeling when a perfectly configured server, website, database, corporate network, and so on, suddenly stops working as expected. Searching for the problem may take a long time, during which the web resource will be temporarily or permanently unavailable to ordinary users. To prevent this from happening, the webmaster must spend a lot of time monitoring the website. Because website accessibility is one of the top priorities of a webmaster.
Common website problems
Instability or complete inaccessibility of large online stores and selling one-pages, blogs and social networks, forums and other resources can be caused by many reasons. And it is important to know the most common reasons.
- Unpaid services. Not paying for hosting on time, forgetting to renew domain or SSL certificate, will lead the website to going offline.
- Server side problems. This includes failed equipment, network problems, logical level hosting organization troubles and server maintenance.
- Hosting capabilities and actual website workload mismatch. Either the webmaster has not calculated the necessary bandwidth, or the actual bandwidth does not match the claimed bandwidth.
- Website problems. Unoptimized scripts, a distanced database location, cascading redirects, etc. can lead to the website useability troubles.
- Various troubles caused by DDOS attacks, HTTP floods, viruses, etc.
It is physically impossible to manually monitor the functioning of web resources around the clock. Therefore, it is desirable to automate the website monitoring process as much as possible, as well as to establish feedback and statistics gathering.
Automated website monitoring solutions
To cope with all of the above, website owners and webmasters often use services such as Google Analytics as a backup solution to the manual website monitoring and statistics gathering. Such services send data to the statistics server every time a user visits the website. But there are also professional tools that deal with such tasks. For example, one such tool is HostTracker automated service for website monitoring.
In general, it is a web-based toolkit specifically designed for fully automated website monitoring. It includes a huge number of services that every website owner or webmaster may need to monitor any website from different locations and various available points of view. And the full potential of its website monitoring capabilities is revealed immediately after registration. Each new user gets a 30-day trial package, thereby gaining access to the full set of tools.
Within seconds of registering, every user can initiate some of the customizable automatic checks by clicking “Add Checks” and selecting one from the drop-down list. And all that’s left, once all the necessary checks are set up, is to click “Add Contacts” to add contacts for notifications, if necessary. HostTracker will send a notification if one or more checks fail for some reason.
Ways to improve website access speed
Even today, in the era of affordable high-speed Internet, the issue of website loading speed remains relevant. And an optimal loading time is from 1.5 to 3 seconds. And there are 5 main reasons for slowing down your website.
- Large web pages. To reduce the amount of data sent to the user’s browser, use GZIP compression. This will reduce the size of web files by 70% without degrading their quality.
- Images are large in size and resolution. Use JPEG images instead of PNG – they weigh 5 times less without compromising on quality. But the main thing is to not over compress it and to find the golden mean between quality and file size.
- Lots of browser requests. The more elements on the page, the more requests the browser sends to the server and the slower it loads. To reduce the number of requests, remove unnecessary images, JS files, third-party codes, combine several small elements into one CSS sprite, and use caching.
- Overloaded JavaScript and CSS. If the JS and CSS code is too long, contains a lot of unnecessary elements, then the page may load with delays. To optimize code, it is possible to clean up the code, place CSS files at the very beginning of the web page, and move JS files to its very bottom.
- Large distance between the server and the user. The further away the hosting provider’s server is from the user, the slower the website loads. CDN services can help with reducing this distance.
- Slow hosting. Ideally, the server response time should not exceed 0.2 seconds. If your figure is much higher, it might be worth considering changing your hosting provider.
All of the above problems can be easily pinpointed with HostTracker services thanks to its notifications system and statistics server.
Common website accessibility errors
If you are the owner or webmaster, you should be familiar with the errors that sometimes occur when users browse your website. And it is important for you to understand what they mean, the reason for their occurrence and how to fix them on the server side.
Error 400 Bad Request
This error means that the server encountered a syntax error in a request entered by the user. However, such an error may occur not only when entering the website address, but also, for example, when logging into the website control panel. There may be several reasons for the error: the browser is blocked by a firewall, a large number of cookies and data in the cache, Internet outages.
Error 403 Forbidden
The server cannot complete the request because access to the requested files or pages is denied. This error can occur for a number of reasons.
- Index file index.html is not loaded in the public_html directory of your website or is loaded incorrectly. To resolve this error, create a file named index.html or rename the existing file. Possible filenames are index.html, index.htm, or index.php.
- The permissions for the directory where the requested file is located are set such that the Apache web server could not read the file on the server disk. To resolve this error, try changing the permissions in the section responsible for setting permissions.
- Website files are loaded in the wrong directory. To correct this error, check if the website files are inside its public_html directory.
Error 404 Not Found
The server cannot find the data requested by the user. The reason for this error on the server side is that the file requested by the URL does not exist on the server. To eliminate this error, you should check if the requested file exists in the public_html directory of your website.
Error 500 Internal Server Error
This error means that an internal error has occurred on the server. This can happen because of incorrect permissions on folders and files, and the server cannot run scripts. Another reason for this error is incorrect instructions in the .htaccess file or unsupported directives in it.
Error 502 Bad Gateway – common website accessibility error
This error is the result of a request that received an invalid response from the server. This may mean that the server load exceeds the resources available on the selected hosting plan. Check with your hosting provider for plans with more resources available.
Error 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable
This error is caused by an overflow in the server request queue. The reasons for this error are usually due to scripts freezing when transferring large static files via PHP. Too many requests, as well as DDoS attacks, flooding, etc.
By delegating monitoring responsibilities to HostTracker services, thereby combining all necessary checks and tests in one place, any webmaster can easily identify any of the above-mentioned errors and quickly fix them. And the webmaster will be notified of every critical problem that will be voiced during the automatic checks. In addition, this service will automatically stop Google Ads to prevent overpayments.
