The performance of a server is contributed to by various aspects. Poor performance and downtimes can be caused by various technical issues. DDoS attacks are one of the most common cyber threats and by purchasing an anti DDoS VPS, you can minimize risk of them and neutralize their impact thus already solving a considerable risk factor for your server performance. However, if your server doesn’t work well or constantly goes down even without DDoS attacks, this means that you have to look for the origin of the problem somewhere else.
In today’s article we want to have a look at some common reasons for a website going down as well as the ways of how to solve these problems.
DDoS Attacks
Since we have already mentioned this kind of cyber threat, let’s dedicate some more attention to it.
DDoS attacks are a common cyber threat that is primarily directed towards damaging the performance of a website, making it slow down or even go down. DDoS attacks consist in attackers using a network of devices that create overwhelming ungenuine traffic towards your website, overloading different parts of it and causing it to experience dramatically decreased performance.
There are different kinds of DDoS attacks that target different levels of your server, being volumetric, that are designed to overwhelm the overall bandwidth of your website, or be targeted onto the protocol level or the application level. The attackers find a way to exploit a vulnerability in the network communications mechanisms of your website and then overwhelm it with a huge number of requests.
DDoS protection systems are taught to recognize general patterns of what a DDoS attack is supposed to look like and recognizing an attack, block its source to prevent it from further harming your website.
DDoS Protections systems apply numerous mechanisms to block the malicious traffic, including traffic filtering, rate limiting, load balancing, auto-scaling, CDN networks and more. Thus, a good DDoS protection solution will protect your website from most kinds of DDoS threats, preventing them from happening and mitigating them, so even the worst scenario won’t be that bad.
Malware
Malware refers to malicious programs written to harm your website in this or that way, with disrupted performance being often a symptom of malware activity. Malware often depends on the vulnerabilities present in your operating system and software that you use. One of the most basic practices to protect from malware is regularly updating everything you can update.
This way you can make sure that older vulnerabilities will be no more present, leaving the attackers less space to perform their actions. Also, make sure to regularly monitor your system and take steps in case any anomalies are detected.
Scaling
Your server relies primarily on the hardware resources it has at its disposal. Your server resources affect, in the first palace, how much traffic your website can accommodate. If you frequently experience downtimes, the reason may originate from insufficient server resources.
If you are only going to start a website on a server, then you have to choose your server carefully, calculating how many resources your website is going to consume. If your website used to work well on your server, but now it can’t accommodate the whole amount of your traffic, you probably have to consider scaling up your server. Start monitoring traffic you currently have, to figure out the average volume of traffic you have to deal with. Based on this, contact and consult your provider so as to figure out the optimal scope of scaling your server up and ask them to eventually upgrade your plan either by upgrading the hardware of your dedicated server or adding more resources to your VPS plan.
Resource Optimization
Besides scaling your server up, you may also consider making it consume resources in a more efficient way. Make sure that the essential tools of your server are configured for the optimal performance. Databases and web servers like Apache, Nginx, MySQL can play a significant role in this regard.
Also, make sure that your website itself, its design is adapted to perform well. Check whether you can do anything to improve the inner working of your website, for which you’ll have to consult a developer. On a more superficial level you should check whether the content on your website is optimized. For example, heavy media may consume a great deal of bandwidth, making your website work slower and be less resistant to heavy traffic. By using lighter versions of the same content, you can liberate a great deal of resources without considerably reducing the quality of your website itself.
Load balancing
Besides optimizing your server itself, you can also use some external tools to distribute your traffic across different servers, thus reducing the load on the main one.
Content Delivery Networks provide considerable assistance in this regard, by storing copies of your website content on external geographically distributed edge-servers so they can be accessed faster by users from remote regions, which also reduce the load on the origin server.
Conclusion
There are many reasons why your website may experience slow performance or even downtimes. In the article above we’ve tried to throw light on reasons that might cause it and simultaneously practices that can solve this issue. All these approaches have a great chance to reduce the risk of your website’s downtime and can be applied at the same time to minimize the risks of slow website’s performance.