Why Does My Website Keep Going Down?
Repeated downtime has a cause: hosting limits, update conflicts, attacks, or a lapsed certificate. How to tell which, what each outage costs, and how to stop it.
In this article· 5 sections
The first time, you assumed it was a blip. The third time, a customer said it: “Tried your site this morning, it was down, so I called the other guys.” You only ever hear about the outages somebody bothered to report. The rest are silent.
Short answer: A website that keeps going down has a cause, usually hosting limits, an update conflict, an attack, or a lapsed certificate. Find the pattern before paying for a fix. Monitoring and the fix are what Managed Website Hosting & Care includes from $99 a month, and the free downtime cost calculator prices what the drops are already costing you.
Read the pattern before buying a cure
When it falls matters more than that it falls. Down after every update points at the site. Down under traffic, or at random hours while the host insists all is well, points at the hosting. Down with strange pages or warnings points at an attack. Down on a schedule points at something expiring.
Write down what you know: dates, times, what the screen showed, what changed just before. Four lines of that is worth more than a weekend of guessing, because each cause has a different repair and three of the four repairs do nothing for the fourth.
A quick first measurement is free: the website health check reads server response time, HTTPS and page weight from your homepage in seconds. A server that answers slowly when it is up is often the same server that stops answering under load.
The four usual causes
One, the host is limiting or overloaded. Cheap shared plans cap memory and processes; a traffic spike or a heavy plugin trips the cap and the site falls over, then mysteriously recovers. The fix is hosting with headroom, or a lighter site, in that order of honesty.
Two, updates and plugins conflict. The site breaks the morning after an update, works again when a plugin is disabled, breaks differently next month. The fix is updates tested on a staging copy before they go live, which Business and Priority include, plus a daily backup to restore when one slips through anyway.
Three, it is being attacked. Strange pages, redirecting visitors, a browser warning, or a host suspension notice. That is the hacked website repair path: clean it, close the way in, then keep it watched. Malware cleanup is included on Business and Priority.
Four, something lapsed. Domain registration or the SSL certificate expired, usually because a card on file died. The fix is embarrassingly small, and a monitor that warns before the date instead of after it.
What the outages are costing you
Price it: visitors a day, times the share who would have become a lead, times what a lead is worth, times your hours down a year.
Fifty visitors a day, 3% becoming enquiries, a $300 average job, and one bad weekend down (48 hours) is roughly $900 of work that knocked on a locked door. Some of those people retry. Many tap the next result, which is why “the site is back up now” is not the same as “no harm done.” The downtime cost calculator runs your numbers, and it says so on the page when your downtime costs less than a plan would.
How it stops
Monitoring that notices before your customers do, a host that is not the cause, updates tested before they land, and a backup from this morning if any of that fails.
That is the whole care plan, pointed at this one problem. Website keeps going down covers the same ground as a service page. Priority adds 24/7 response when the site drops.
| Plan | Price | What you actually get |
|---|---|---|
| Essentials | $99 a month | Hosting, SSL, daily backups, updates, 30 minutes of changes, response within 2 business days. A fix or backup restore is included. Outages jump the line during business hours. |
| Business (most popular) | $249 a month | Everything in Essentials, 1 hour of changes, updates tested on a staging copy before they go live, malware cleanup included. |
| Priority | $499 a month | Everything in Business, 3 hours of changes, a dedicated server, 24/7 response if the site goes down. |
All three are monthly, billed through Stripe, and you can cancel any time. See the plans.
When to leave it alone
A few minutes down once a year is normal internet weather. If your outage history is genuinely that, and the downtime math comes out under the plan price, keep your money and your current host.
It is also worth saying: if the site is down right now and stays down, that is not a monitoring purchase, that is a repair. Send a question with what the screen shows and when it started. I reply by email, and we fix the outage first and argue about plans after.
FAQ
Why does my website keep going down? +
The common causes are a host that is overloaded or limiting the account, an update or plugin conflict, an attack, or a domain or SSL lapse. Each has a different fix, which is why the pattern of the outages matters more than any single outage.
How much does website downtime cost a small business? +
Take your visitors a day, the share who become leads, and the value of one lead. Twenty-four hours down at 50 visitors a day, 3% converting at $300 a lead, is about $450 of enquiries that went to a dead page. The free downtime cost calculator does the math with your numbers.
How do I know when my site is down if nobody tells me? +
Uptime monitoring checks the site around the clock and records every drop, so you get a real outage history instead of the outages a customer happened to report. Every Managed Website Hosting & Care plan includes it, from $99 a month.
Do I have to change hosts to stop the downtime? +
No. I can look after the site on your current host. If that host turns out to be the cause, moving one standard site to hosting I look after is included in every plan, and the move is tested before your domain switches.
