11 Helpful Tips to Keep Your Website Healthy Before Festive Season

A backup copy of the site is your lifeline in case of any force majeure. At any time, you can get your website up and running by restoring from backup

Make sure that backup copies work correctly and save the necessary data. To do this, deploy a copy of the site on the server – for example, on a subdomain.

History has known cases of data losses in cloud storages, with hosters, on personal hard drives, but not losing all data at once everywhere. Store backups in different places.

Build a recovery plan. It is better if there are several plans when the server, data center, Internet fell in half the world. The limit is only your pessimism.

Form a set of recovery instructions in case your admin is on vacation, sick leave, or unavailable for another reason. Who to call, write, what instructions to give, and what would be approximate idle time. 80% of accidents are much easier to withstand when there is a contingency plan.

Monitor critical parameters on the server: load, disk space, available memory, process status. You can use ready-made monitoring solutions (Munin, Zabbix, etc) or entrust monitoring to a hosting expert. Check the status of the site from outside, at least through Google. Everything may be in order on the server. Problems may come up from outside, with site availability or speed.

Set up instant notifications about critical problems: the site does not work, the resources have run out. Notifications of all non-critical issues should be set up within business hours.

Test the monitoring by running several test crashes. For example, fill the disk storage, take your website down for some time when the traffic is minimal. You need to be sure that any incident is logged.

Check at least once a quarter if there are enough server resources for the needs of the project. You can run load testing or check the use of monitoring resources. Optimize your server settings if necessary. The status of any project is dynamic, and settings made six months ago may not be suitable for the current state of the website.

Before the planned traffic growth (advertising, seasonal promotions), perform load testing. The situation when ads were launched on the site, and it crashes due to lack of resources, saddens any marketer.

If the load suddenly increases (this should be reported by monitoring system from point 6), but there is no traffic, contact your admins. This may be a sign of a cyber attack (CSRF, DDoS, etc.), sudden hardware degradation or other trouble.