Question

1. A fashion company is expecting a sudden and massive increase in # of customers visiting their website. Management has decided to use cloud services to prevent their website from crashing. Which capabilities is the primary reason why it will help the company in this case?
   1. Scalable
   2. Pooled
   3. Elastic
   4. The internet

Answer 1

d.The internet

The top 8 reasons behind a website crash

1. Code Errors

Sometimes your website crashes because you, or someone else who has access to your website, accidentally broke the web code.

This usually happens because someone messes something up while they’re doing maintenance or updating the website. If you experience a website crash after you know someone was working on it, then it probably crashed because of a code error.

2. Virus Attacks

Attacks are the other extreme a website crash. These attacks could be from bots or actual people maliciously trying to hack into your website.

There are a lot of bots on the internet, and a lot of them carry virus software. They are like the insects of the internet. They crawl around the internet and try to find websites they can break into.

If one gets attracted to your website, the rest will swarm, usually causing your website to crash. The bots don’t even have to even break in to make the site shut down.

3. Hackers

Another type of website attack comes from hackers, people deliberately trying to break into your website.

One of the easiest hackers attacks is called a DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service attack. This means the hacker overwhelms your website with traffic from all kinds of sources. If the hacker is successful, your website will crash.

There are many other kinds of hacker attacks that can also cause damage to your website.

4. Plugin/Extension Errors

A plugin or extension are pieces of software that add onto your website and give it additional features. In other words, they let your website display content and functions that weren’t originally part of your site.

Think of it this way, you buy a new phone, but it doesn’t have any way to store or play music. So you download a music app, and now your phone can play music, something it wasn’t able to do before.

The problem with plugins and extensions is that they’re made by other people you don’t know. Some of those creators may make one that isn’t very stable and others may make a great plugin but fail to update it.

Whether the plugin or extension is just not made very well or not updated, they can sometimes give out. When that happens, your whole website can crash.

5. Service Provider Error

This error is one of the most frustrating to sit through because you can’t do anything about it.

A web hosting service providers are what make your website show up on the internet. You can’t have a website unless it is being hosted, or in the simplest way to put it stored, by a service provider.

Unfortunately, even service provider websites can go down, meaning your website will go down also. It could be for any number of reasons, including maintenance or any of the same things that could happen to your website.

Service providers always get their servers up and running again, usually pretty quickly too, but until they fix it, you just have to wait patiently.

6. Hosting Error

This kind of fits right in with the last error, but sometimes your website can go down because you don’t have a large enough hosting plan.

Maybe you forgot about your plan and haven’t updated it since you started your website, or maybe your website just had a sudden growth.

Either way, as your website continues to develop and get more traffic, your hosting plan should grow with it. If your hosting plan is too small and a lot of people try to get onto your website, it will shut itself down.

Fortunately, this error is a simple fix. Just contact your hosting providers and select a larger plan.

7. Domain Error

Your domain may be a few small words, but it is one of the biggest parts of your website.

Your domain name is the address to your website. If you invited someone over to your house but didn’t give them the address, they wouldn’t be able to find the house. The same thing happens with a domain name. If people can’t find your domain, they can’t find your website.

And domains do expire.

If your domain expires, your website will no longer appear online.

Make a habit of checking the expiration date of your domain to make sure it never expires.

8. Traffic Error

This just means too many people tried to visit your website at once.

You know on Black Friday when so many people rush into a store at once things end up breaking and people get hurt? When too many people visit your website at once, it kind of becomes its own little Black Friday.

You probably remember back in 2015 when the theater websites crashed because so many people were trying to buy tickets to “The Force Awakens.” It’s the same thing for your website.

If too many people try to look for exterminators reviews near Rock Hill SC and the Go Forth website isn’t ready, it could crash. Make sure that your server can handle a sudden rush of traffic so that doesn’t happen to you.

HOW TO AVOID WEBSITE CRASHES:

Be prepared. Set a schedule for testing and simulations well in advance of your big product launch. Employ a temporary team for testing if you need to. Use load testing tools to simulate a jump in incoming web traffic. This will help you find the places that load the slowest so you can optimize them before your big day.

Use a content delivery network (CDN). CDNs are cloud-based data services that scale themselves automatically to optimize delivery of every type of content from basic websites to data-heavy things like software and video. Reliability is king, which is why some big names like Amazon, CDNetworks, and Windows Azure got into the game. Whichever you choose, be sure to set it up and start testing at least four weeks from your expected traffic spike.

Keep daily backups of the website’s files, including all databases being used. If the site crashes, having a recent backup will ensure the site content will remain current.

Keep all website software like content management systems, shopping carts, message boards, etc. up to date with their latest versions. Sometimes bugs or security holes are found in older versions which can cause a website to crash or operate unexpectedly.

Do a basic check on your server. Contact your webmaster (or look to yourself) and ask to ensure that you don’t have basic data caps in place with your website host. Lots of web hosts impose general data caps that limit the capacity of data transfer to and from a website. While this normally wouldn’t present an issue for regular usage, sites that expect to come under heavy traffic should manually request removal of the caps. This might require some additional expense but it will be well worth it to ensure that your user experience is seamless.

Now, let’s say you’ve done the steps above and thought you were in the clear—only to get word that your site couldn’t handle the influx of clicks, got overloaded, and suddenly quit. You need some damage control, pronto. Here’s what to do:

Don’t panic. See above about yours not being the first or the last website to experience an outage. These things happen. It’s just part of doing business.

Don’t hide. Work as quickly as possible to repair the problem, while sending a message to all your key audiences letting them know that your site is so popular, it crashed due to overwhelming demand.

Contact the web hosting company and find out more about their uptime policies and guarantees. They may offer credits towards your hosting fee if the site goes down.

Use other outlets to communicate with your customers and take responsibility for the outage. Post an apology on your business’ Facebook page. Send an email to your current mailing list. Do everything you can to let your clients know that you understand their frustrations and your business is working hard to resolve the outage.