So, you own or manage a website like Online Shop or Blog and looking how to troubleshoot a website. The site is made with any of these:

• WordPress/WooCommerce
• OpenCart
• PrestaShop
• MODX
• Joomla
• Drupal
• Custom made with PHP/Python/RubyOnRails
• You name it

and instead of your site you see pages like these?

Troubles

• 400 Bad Request
• 413 Request Entity Too Large
• This page isn’t working (HTTP Error 500)
• 502 Bad Gateway
• Gateway time-out (Error code 504)
• Web server is down (Error code 521)
• Your connection is not private (NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID, NET::ERR_CERT_INVALID)
• This site has been reported unsafe
• Redirected you too many times (ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS)

The errors may vary but the consequences are usually the same:

• Loss in SEO
• Removal from the SERP
• Lost orders
• Loss of the money spent on ads
• Lost profit

Sometimes you don’t have critical errors but the website isn’t loading quick enough, and that leads to, again, lower SERP positions, visitors close the page because they don’t  want to wait.

Reasons

Top reasons that lead to the issues on the website are the following:

1. You are using shared hosting. Shared hosting could save you several dozens of dollars a month, but almost any shared hosting is a bad choice for the sites with traffic.
2. Your dedicated server or VPS is not good enough. Even though own dedicated server is much better solution than shared hosting, often you need much better one to handle the demands of your website.
3. DDoS. They cost cheap nowadays and can make a lot of troubles. Unfair competitors and other mean people can order a DDoS for your site.
4. You are not using page cache. Any CMS requires page caching plugin to be able to handle the traffic.
5. You are not using database query cache. That is a different kind of caching that helps to lower down the pressure on the database with the help of memcache/redis/etc caching.
6. Bad SQL queries and structure. Non-optimised queries, the lack of table indexes could lead to high database activity and server overload.
7. Your dedicated server (or VPS) is not properly setup and tuned. The server setup may have bottlenecks caused by non-optimal software settings.
8. Your website engine and/or plugins/modules on it are outdated and contain vulnerabilities, no auto-upgrades are used.

Use Case – How to Troubleshoot a Website

1. Ask for help: push the buttons below 👇 or fill the contact form. You describe the issue, we sign NDA if needed, you give us credentials and we are starting to analyse and troubleshoot the website. The first 2 hours are for free. There is a chance that only small change is needed and you get your issue fixed on this step for free and we are done.
2. If you and us come to a conclusion that complete hosting re-setup is needed we choose the tariff plan and start paid services.
3. Based on the requirements collected on the previous step you order new empty server or VPS.
4. If we use dedicated bare-metal server, one day hardware stress test is recommended.
5. While the server is on the stress test we are preparing the code (Infrastructure as Code) to manage the server and website according to our Architecture.
6. As we separate each site to a dedicated Linux user you can host many sites (up to thousands) on a single server. We deploy the website (or websites) without switching DNS. Provide you with the code and database access. You, usually with your website developer, have to test it thoroughly, verify that admin part, orders page, email sending, etc works.
7. We discuss and make sure that engine auto-upgrades, DB query caching, page caching and other needed optimisations are used. Help developer to profile and optimise the code, DB queries if needed. Load tests are needed usually as well.
8. When we come to a conclusion that new setup is ready, we setup CDN, WAF (usually CF Pro plan is recommended), sync the data and switch DNS of the site so it starts being served from the new server.
9. We make sure that data backups are being made.
10. We are starting to analyse the metrics from the CDN and the server, starting the monitoring process of the server and the website. We are monitoring many dozens of parameters, but the most important are:
    1. Server availability, CPU load, memory usage.
    2. Disks free space.
    3. Website availability from outside, a text pattern on the site, SSL certificate health on the website.
    4. Backups.
11. We discuss the results and improvements achieved.

Approximate Costs

Typical online shop or blog usually fits into a single dedicated server and we recommend this solution as you get deserving performance for the lowest cost. So, approximate costs of renting the server from the provider and our services to move and support the website on this server for 6 (six) months are:

We Can Help

We believe that every website deserves great operation and we know what to do to make it happen and how to troubleshoot a website.

Please, feel free to message us with messengers or email or fill the form below to let us help you. We will discuss your website issues, we provide 2 hours consultation for free.

Also if something stops you from messaging us because you are confused or don’t like something in our service description, please, write us about it (use one time email to remain anonymous). We want to make our service offers better and appreciate your feedback!

Email: [email protected]
Phone: +385 99 745 8963