How To Prevent Your Server From Crashing

After creating an amazing website, you should always know how to prevent your server from crashing, reducing any potential downtime.

Creating an authoritative website, with a trusted online presence, takes a lot of time and effort, so the last thing you need is for that all to be swept away by a server crash.

Not only will an unexpected server crash take your website down, but it can also impact your PPC and SEO efforts, as well as your reputation with customers.

So ensure any server downtime is kept to a minimum with the following tips.

Choosing The Right Server

Just as there are many options available when it comes to choosing your heating and electricity providers for your home, there are different options you can choose to prevent your server from crashing and protecting your business;

Shared Hosting – This option saves you money but comes with a risk. You could end up suffering downtime if one of the other users overloads the server

VPS Hosting – With this option you still share a server but have your own section of it. You are still at risk if someone crashes the server but your data is better protected

Dedicated Hosting – You get a whole server to yourself so it is up to you to maintain it from a client-side. However, chances are your server will be located elsewhere from your business and it still at risk from external issues such as heat spikes, fire or flood

Cloud Hosting – Alternatively, you may wish to use Amazon Web Services, which is a Cloud solution. This means there is no physical server, so it can’t get damaged or overheat. However, it is still at risk from virtual issues such as a server overload or hacking

Own Hosting – If you have the space for it, with the proper climate controls available, you can buy your own server and keep it at your premises.

This means you can deal with internal and external issues as soon as they arise. For large enterprise companies, you’ll likely want to look at having two or more separate servers. One functioning as a web server, which hosts the website files, with another server used solely for databases

Firewalls

You should already have these in place if you operate an eCommerce website but often companies set up their firewalls in the early stages and then leave them to run.

There are many different firewall programs available that help you identify and tackle threats and prevent your server from crashing, but a lot of the work is going to have to come from you.

Use your firewall software to;

• identify and block harmful requests from spam IPs
• bottleneck high volumes of spam requests to prevent your server from crashing
• prevent harmful viruses from travelling between servers in a network

Temperature Control

It might seem strange to focus on such a basic thing considering the futuristic technology we have at our disposal these days but the temperature is vital to ensure your server stays operational.

In 2013, Hotmail lost its server for 16 hours because of a heat spike in its server room. The technology needed to keep the machines cool failed and the servers had to shut down to avoid being damaged.

It is imperative that you keep your server room between 20 and 22 degrees Celsius (around 68-71 Fahrenheit). If it rises above 27 degrees, your servers are going to suffer.

CRON Jobs

A CRON job is a program that allows users to schedule commands or scripts at a specified time and date.

These scheduled jobs are often set for systems such as Magento and WordPress and mean that developers can save time by automating a lot of their updates.

However, when combined with resource-intensive backup processes, these CRON jobs can build up and cause the server load to rise. If this rise goes unchecked, a high number of scheduled CRON jobs can lead to a server crash.

A simple solution to this problem is to rearrange the number of CRON jobs occurring at the same time. Spread them out across a longer time frame and so you’ll have less running at once.

You can also schedule them to run during quiet times for your eCommerce website, such as overnight when user traffic is lower.

Monitoring Software

Depending on your situation, you should be making use of server monitoring software to spot issues before they become a major problem causing downtime.

Commonly used tools include NewRelic, Boundary and NodeQuery, all of which will continuously monitor your server load, even when you are away from the office.

These tools will keep an eye on your server and alert you if it reaches a pre-determined load limit. This gives you time to find the issue, address it and solve it before your server crashes.

Always Have a Backup

Though this doesn’t really prevent your server crashing, having a backup is like having home insurance – you need it but hope you never have to use it.

If you use WHM (Web Host Manager), you can set up a daily backup to AWS S3, which will regularly back up all of your important data to a Cloud solution.

There are other cloud backup solutions available, such as CodeGuard, although these may be expensive depending on the type of package you choose.

How to prevent your server from crashing

There are a number of ways you can reduce the risk of a server crash, most of which can be implemented immediately and will start working straight away.

Prevent your server from crashing before it happens, it is a job you can’t put off until later. You never know when an issue may arise out of the blue and cause your server to shut down.

The business you lose during this time and the damage to your reputation is preventable, so don’t put it off any longer – prevent your server from crashing.

If you would like to discuss protecting your website from server crashes, get in touch with our expert team today.