ah wouldn't it be nice if everything in life were 100 reliable i mean your car
your computer your flaky girlfriend who swears there's
no one else in the picture unfortunately few things are truly reliable and that
includes the websites that you count on to be around when you need them even
those sometimes go down but riley don't most big sites live on powerful
geo-replicated servers dedicated to web hosting how does this happen
well there are plenty of reasons a simple but common issue is that some
websites aren't actually set up to deal with tons of traffic you see just like
your home pc and internet connection a web hosting server only has so much
bandwidth on its incoming connection and also only has so much processing power
to handle all of those requests so if a smaller website isn't equipped for a
sudden influx of visitors because some celebrities compromising photos got
posted there you might have a hard time accessing it and you also might want to
think about your life choices a similar but more malicious cause of website
difficulties is the dreaded ddos attack so the idea here is to do what we just
described overwhelm a server with requests rendering it effectively
inaccessible except it's on purpose the
first d in ddos stands for distributed
meaning many connected devices some of which may be part of a botnet attack a
server at once the motivations behind these types of attacks vary greatly as
wise old alfred put it some men just want to watch the world
bone and you can learn more about them right up here but a server being too
busy to handle requests is just one reason it can go down sometimes there
can be problems with the hosting service itself which can be caused by anything
from a hardware or software problem to a malware attack to even a natural
disaster and that's where things really hit the fan because if one of the web's
major hosting providers is affected the outages can be widespread for example
cloudflare handles hosting for a billion ip addresses and 10 of the fortune 1000
so a problem with a service like that can cause outages or slowdowns all over
the internet as it did on july 2nd 2019
when a ton of sites went down due to a huge spike in CPU usage another common
issue is a problem with the site's address sometimes a website will need to
change its ip address which you can learn more about up here
so trying to punch in the domain name that you're used to will result in the
browser being pointed to the wrong ip address and likely a page not found
error until the domain name system or dns gets updated to reflect the new
address other kinds of simple user errors are surprisingly common a system
administrator can forget to renew the domain name leave a cable unplugged
misconfigure ports neglect to set up backups and even just spill their diet
coke onto a server rack yet klutz and finally sometimes the issue doesn't stem
from a problem at all sites need maintenance to update code or hardware
and oftentimes they have to be taken offline for a short while while this
happens now many organizations have plans for this to minimize downtime such
as performing maintenance at times when they're not expecting much traffic and
larger companies like google can serve users from an alternate location if one
of their other servers needs to be worked on however if an error occurs
during an update downtime can last much longer than expected and a final tip is
that if you can't access a website but you're not sure whether the site is
actually down or not there's a great site called down for everyone or just
me.com that you can use to check in on all the most important hotspots on the
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the link below well that's it for this Techquickie guys like the video if you
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