8 Common Web Hosting Problems and How to Solve Them

With people and businesses moving online and creating websites, reliable web hosting providers are more in demand than ever.

People often choose a hosting provider that provides plenty of features and functionalities at an affordable price. Things like 99% uptime, 24/7 customer support are some of the highlighted features. An excellent example of this is the web hosting Hostinger.

But even the best hosting providers are not immune to problems. This article will provide you with eight of the most common web hosting problems and the simple ways to solve them.

Let’s get started.

1. Slow Loading Time

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Customers expect a website to load within three seconds or less. 75% of users won’t return to a website if it takes longer than four seconds to load. Hence a slow loading time results in poor conversion and bad search engine ranking.

If you’re using a shared hosting plan, slow loading time is a common issue because the server gets overloaded or the resources get exceeded.

An excellent solution to prevent your site from having a slow loading time is by upgrading your hosting plan to either a VPS, dedicated or cloud hosting service. Also, make sure to check whether your hosting provider has a content delivery network included in the hosting plan.

2. Website Not Showing

There could be several reasons why your website is not showing. Some of them could be:

• Internet connection – Try going to other websites to see whether you can access those sites on the same server. If you can’t, that means something is wrong with your internet connection.
• IP address temporarily blocked – If your internet connection is good, but you still can’t access your website, check if you can access the website from a different computer. If you can, that means you probably triggered a Firewall violation. Contact your hosting provider to help remove it.

Other reasons for the website not showing could be server maintenance, missing a payment, or having an expired domain. If you still can’t access your website after trying the first two methods, contact your hosting provider to get complete details of why your website isn’t loading correctly.

3. Difficulties of Logging in to Your Mailbox

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This issue could arise because your mail server is down or not configured correctly.

Luckily you can easily find the cause of this problem and solve it by heading to your account and the configuration in your email client. Ensure that your email account has not exceeded the limit you chose. If it has exceeded the limit, the solution is to either upgrade your resources or wait until the next month for the quota to reset.

Also, make sure that your hosting provider isn’t doing any upgrades to your email server. If they are, you’ll need to wait until the upgrade is complete to be able to access your mailbox.

4. Weak Security

With more and more people and businesses establishing websites of their own, cybersecurity threats are rising too.

Their aim is, of course, to cause a disruption to your website and perhaps also steal your personal information so they can get a financial reward.

It’s the job of a web hosting company to protect your data the best they can, but sadly there are web hosts who give a false sense of security.

To make sure your hosting company provides excellent security, here are some things you need to look out for:

• Ensure they provide an SSL certificate.
• Make sure they have malware detection and removal software.
• Ensure they have a well-established firewall and a CDN.
• Check if they enforce multi-factor authentication.

5. Your Website Is Blocked in Some Countries

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This problem mainly occurs with shared hosting. In shared hosting, you share the same IP address with other websites. This means that if one website becomes blacklisted, your website and emails might also suffer the same effect.

The solution is to upgrade your hosting plan to either VPS, cloud, or dedicated hosting, where you get your individual IP address. Or, if you lack the funds, switch to another hosting provider’s shared hosting plan, but this is more complex and takes longer.

6. 404 Errors

This is a standard error code you’ll encounter, and it is mainly caused by broken links. This means users can’t visit the page you’re linking to because the server cannot find the URL you requested.

There are many reasons why this could happen. Sometimes, the URLs change because something goes wrong in the server – it may have been updated or doesn’t exist anymore. It’s important to note that this error indicates that users are on the right page, but something went wrong.

To prevent and solve this problem, you can use analytical tools or broken link monitoring tools to help pinpoint any 404 errors so you can fix them promptly to avoid causing more inconveniences for users.

7. Wrong Website Layout

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You might’ve just updated your site’s layout, but instead of displaying the new changes, it only displays text and no design elements.

This issue can happen because your site’s CSS file is missing. So here are some steps you can take to solve this:

1. Reupload the CSS files or your entire website’s file from backups because the CSS file might’ve not been uploaded the first time.
2. If this still doesn’t work, you need to find where your CSS file is stored and move it to the updated site’s code.

8. Slow Problem Solving

When you inevitably encounter problems with your hosting, you need to contact your hosting provider’s customer support to assist you with the issue and hope it gets resolved quickly.

You need to make sure that when you’re choosing a hosting provider, they provide 24/7 customer support so they can resolve your issues swiftly and respond within minutes of your inquiry.

This is crucial because there are hosting providers that only provide a contact form to register your complaints. Usually, they’ll solve it at their convenience. Some also just redirect you to their FAQs page and offer no other support.

Conclusion

You can go with the best web hosting providers and still face problems sometimes. You should be wary of that and know the necessary steps to resolve those issues quickly.

Here are the possible issues webmasters tend to face sometimes, no matter how reliable their web host is:

1. Slow Loading Time
2. Website Not Showing
3. Difficulties to Log in to Your Mailbox
4. Weak Security
5. Your Website Is Blocked in Some Countries
6. 404 Errors
7. Wrong Website Layout
8. Slow Problem Solving

Now that you know how to solve them, you have to constantly monitor your website using analytical or monitoring tools. Good luck!