Downtime is a silent killer. Whether you’re running a SaaS, a digital agency, or a personal project, your website being down—even for a few minutes—can hurt your reputation, your revenue, and your momentum.
In this post, we’ll break down the most common causes of website downtime and what you can do to prevent them.
1. Inadequate Hosting or Traffic Spikes
Not all downtime is caused by failure—sometimes your site goes down because it succeeds. That viral tweet, a launch on Product Hunt, or an unexpected influx of users can overload your server if your hosting plan isn’t ready.
Shared hosting environments and low-resource VPS setups are especially vulnerable. If your infrastructure doesn’t scale automatically, you could be looking at an outage right when visibility is highest.
➡️ Choosing a scalable host and pairing it with PingCat’s uptime monitoring helps you catch crashes before your users do.
2. DNS Misconfigurations
DNS is like the address book of the internet. When DNS records are misconfigured—wrong IP, missing records, or accidental edits—your website becomes unreachable, even if the server is fine.
These errors can go unnoticed during migrations, especially when you’re moving fast. Agencies managing many domains or indie hackers juggling multiple side projects are especially at risk. DNS issues are hard to debug unless you’re actively checking for them.
➡️ Consider using a tool like DNSChecker to validate changes. And monitor uptime continuously to detect DNS-related outages early.
3. Expired SSL Certificates
This is one of the easiest causes of downtime to prevent—and also one of the most common. If your SSL certificate expires, modern browsers will block access to your site with a big scary warning screen.
For first-time visitors or clients, this can feel like your site is hacked—even when it’s just expired. SaaS owners and developers often forget manual renewals or run into failed auto-renewals due to card issues or registrar bugs.
➡️ PingCat’s SSL certificate monitoring sends automatic expiration alerts days before it becomes a problem. Combine this with Let’s Encrypt for easy renewals.
4. Domain or DNS Expiration
Domains are often set and forgotten—until they expire. When that happens, all your services break, and your email might go with it. This can be fatal for agencies managing domains for clients, or solo founders using personal registrars they rarely check.
Even if the domain doesn’t fully expire, DNS records might vanish when it lapses briefly, causing intermittent issues. A basic uptime monitor can help you catch this before your domain becomes publicly unavailable.
➡️ Our free website monitoring includes alerts even when your site is completely offline—so you’re never caught off guard.
5. Bad Deploys or Code Errors
Not all outages are infrastructure-based. Sometimes, you push broken code to production. One misplaced comma, unhandled exception, or wrong environment variable can make your homepage crash.
This is especially common for developers who ship often (hello, indie hackers 👋). CI/CD pipelines don’t always catch frontend errors or backend logic issues. Without external monitoring, your team might not even know it’s down until someone tweets about it.
➡️ PingCat detects 500s and failed responses in seconds. Combine it with logging tools like Sentry or LogRocket for full visibility.
Monitoring = Peace of Mind
Downtime isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes it’s silent, partial, and easy to miss—until you lose customers, leads, or credibility.
With a simple website monitoring tool like PingCat, you get instant website downtime alerts, SSL certificate monitoring, and checks from global locations—all set up in under 2 minutes.
And yes, we have a free website monitoring plan so you can start without friction.
