Webmasters Stack Exchange
Webmasters Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [downtime]

Use the downtime tag for questions relating to avoiding your website being down during upgrades, maintenance, high traffic, and other events related to webmastering. As well as the importance of being available to visitors, site uptime is a factor in search engine optimisation.

35 questions
37
votes
10 answers

Preparing for a huge spike in traffic

Our company will be appearing on a prime time TV show this week, and they've told us we can expect around 200,000 visitors on our website all at once. We normally only get about 100 visits per day, so I've no idea if we can handle that much traffic.…
SamTheMan
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31
votes
5 answers

Updating a web app without any downtime

It's a PHP app. How can I minimize the downtime while updating the entire codebase?
gAMBOOKa
18
votes
4 answers

How to seamlessly transfer a domain (avoid downtime because the previous registrar's nameservers stopped serving DNS records)

I just transferred a domain from GoDaddy to NameCheap.com. There was a period of downtime until I configured the proper settings at NameCheap. During this downtime browsers returned a 408 Request Timeout error. Next time, how do I avoid the downtime…
Leftium
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15
votes
4 answers

Alternative to Pingdom website monitoring service

I need a website monitoring service to make sure my app is not only up but also responsive. Pingdom is great, but just so expensive. Is there anything like it but more affordable? UPDATE: I'd like 1 minute interval checks at least. By responsive,…
at01
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8
votes
3 answers

I want to test major changes on my website without hurting SEO

I want to replace all my website files for new ones on the server and to test if they work alright but I don't want to be crawled while this is happening or if I am, I don't want the crawler to be able to see what's in the new page. I just want to…
wxiiir
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8
votes
4 answers

How can I update my site without forcing users to wait?

Downtime is inconvenient for users and currently they have to wait any time a site's engine is being upgraded. Additionally, when using off-the-shelf scripts there's a risk that a setting change won't work as well as intended (even if they've been…
Gelatin
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7
votes
2 answers

Effect on Google rankings if my site is down?

What happens to my Google rankings when my site goes down for a short or long period of time?
Virendar
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5
votes
2 answers

My site is down everyday for about 15 minutes, how does this affect SEO?

Will this affect the site's ranking with Google and if so, how?
Jennifer
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5
votes
2 answers

302 & 503 for temporary site down page: what to use for 'retry-after'?

If I want to temporary take down a website but the timeframe could be from 1 day to 1-2 weeks, I know that a 302 redirect (to a down.html page for instance) is best in order to preserve the existing SEO value of the site. I've also read that one…
Miak
  • 173
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4
votes
1 answer

Can't remove an old domain from Bing when DNS no longer resolves

I'm trying to use Bing's Content Removal page to remove an old domain from search results. The domain belongs to an old staging site and is no longer live, but got picked up by Bing somewhere along the way. When trying to remove the URL Bing…
Andrew Lott
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4
votes
1 answer

How should I evaluate how long a website can be down for regularly scheduled maintenance?

I'm working on a system that is going to need some regularly scheduled maintenance for: upgrades and releases regular data migration and database maintenance How should I determine how long these maintenance windows can be and how often they can…
Stephen Ostermiller
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3
votes
2 answers

Avoiding downtime after DOS and change of IP

I have a small company designing, programing, and maintaining websites. I host my websites on a shared hosting plan (cpanel). I received an email 2 days ago that there was a DOS attack and the provider changed the IP address as a result. I then had…
apetros85
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3
votes
2 answers

What to do when web server hosting is down?

Update: As of Oct 21, 8AM EST, it's still down. I'll call Rackspace again My web server is hosted by Rackspace Mycloud and today Oct 20, 2015 there is an unexpected outage. I have Rackspace's $11/month option. All my files are on that server, which…
Melissa
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3
votes
1 answer

When replacing our website with a temporary news feed during a crisis, what is the best way to preserve SEO?

Together with our "Crisis management" Team, we plan to make an "Twitter-like" frontpage for our website only activated during an "disruptive and unexpected event". Whats the best way to not lose Google rankings during this time period? Is a…
user966660
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2
votes
3 answers

Safely turning off CloudFlare?

I'd like to selectively turn off CloudFlare ("the orange cloud icon") for some subdomains. But this would cause downtimes for people with certain network configurations, especially those with exotic DNS servers lagging couple of days to update…
puzzlet
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