Web Site Dependability
2. Is Your Website DEPENDABLE?
This relates to something more technical, which I will divide into just three short questions.
Is your website current? If it is outdated either in its appearance, the copyright (usually at the bottom of the page) or the "last updated" statement that appears on some websites, you are going to be penalized regarding your website’s dependability.
Does your website load quickly? If it is slow to load, you may have a server dependability issue, and if so, it is only your fault for buying cheap web hosting or buying web hosting from someone that either does not know what they are doing or they have overloaded the server.
A server can host from one (dedicated server) to several thousand websites, and web hosting servers can also perform other tasks, like running software and email management. These programs can bog the server down and either make it very slow to dispense WebPages or cause it to crash.
A slow loading website could also be the graphic designer’s problem, which may be you. On a website, you can take a 10 meg image (which is very large for the web) and tell it to display the image at 1 pixel square—not even visible. Regardless, the server will be trying to download a 10 meg file.
This is why we build pajezy.com with an "image generator." We have a program embedded in pajezy.com that accepts the large digital image uploads and resizes them on the fly into a thumbnail image and three other good sizes for the web. This puts an end to a potential user error.
What is your web hosting servers "uptime" like? If you are discovering that your website is not visible with any frequency, you need to move to a new hosting service.
All web hosting servers can crash or suffer some slowness and need to have particular services restarted or even the whole server (computer) to be rebooted, but if you are seeing this a lot, there is no excuse for it.
If you get clients calling you because "your site is down" and it really is, then you need to do some shopping for a new website hosting provider.
Your website may appear to be down, however, when the server is up. When you are viewing your website, it is not like looking at a document on your own computer. Between your computer and the web hosting server are lots of electronic devices that can fail (burn up and need replacing). It may not be the server at all.
You can check your website with a service like alertra.com. Just go there and pop in your domain name and wait on the results. It will display your website’s visibility from several main datacenters all over the world - it is the world wide web, after all.
If your website can be "seen" from any of those points, then your website hosting server is up.
This is why we house our website hosting servers in large, reliable datacenters, — to maximize the uptime and worldwide visibility of our client’s websites.
Sometimes, your website can appear to be down because of DNS propagation issues. If your site is being moved to a new server or DNS services are being changed, the service can be spotty from 2 hours to even 2 days in some places. Every component on the web that transfers data has a TTL (time to live) and when that time refreshes, the DNS records are updated for that particular device.
So, before you accuse outright, check a service like alertra.com.
How DEPENDABLE is your Web site? Grade it!
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