How to Prevent Website Downtime: A Practical Guide for 2026

This guide covers the practical steps that eliminate the most common causes of downtime — specifically for indie makers, small SaaS teams, and anyone running production services without a dedicated DevOps team.

The 80/20 of Downtime Prevention

Focus Here First

Before diving into specifics, here's the reality: a small number of practices prevent the vast majority of downtime.

If you do nothing else, do these five things:

The Top 5 — Do These First

Set up uptime monitoring with alerts — you need to know when your site is down before customers tell you
Enable auto-renewal for SSL certificates and domains — expired certificates are the most preventable cause of outages
Automate deployments with rollback capability — manual deploys are error-prone; automated deploys with quick rollback are forgiving
Monitor disk space — full disks crash databases, fill log files, and silently break everything
Have a status page ready — when downtime happens (it will), communicate fast

These five things will prevent roughly 80% of common outages. Everything else in this guide is the remaining 20%.

Infrastructure Basics That Prevent Most Outages

Your Foundation Matters

Server and hosting choices

Single server = single point of failure. If your entire app runs on one VPS, that VPS going down means 100% downtime. For early-stage products, that's acceptable — just know the risk.

When you're ready to reduce risk:

Separate your database from your application server. If your app crashes, your data survives.
Use managed services where possible. Managed databases (RDS, PlanetScale, MongoDB Atlas) handle backups, failover, and patching. You probably shouldn't be managing PostgreSQL on a bare metal server at 3 AM.
Consider a CDN for static assets. Cloudflare's free tier serves your CSS, JS, and images from edge locations. If your origin goes down, cached content still loads.

Resource monitoring — the silent killers

Resources that fill up gradually are the silent killers:

Disk space — databases crash when disks are full. Logs grow forever if you don't rotate them. Set alerts at 80% capacity.

Memory — memory leaks cause gradual degradation then sudden crashes. Monitor RSS usage over time.

CPU — sustained high CPU often indicates runaway processes or inefficient queries. Set alerts at sustained 90%.

Connection pools — exhausted database connections cause cascading failures. Monitor active vs. available connections.

Pro tip: Set up basic resource monitoring even before you need it. The disk that fills up on a Friday night will ruin your weekend.

Deployment Without Drama

Most Outages Are Self-Inflicted

Deployment is the single most common cause of outages. You push code, something breaks, users notice before you do.

Never deploy on Fridays

This isn't superstition — it's risk management. If something breaks Friday afternoon, you're debugging through the weekend or leaving users with a broken product until Monday.

Always have a rollback plan

Before every deploy, know exactly how to revert. With containers, keep the previous image tagged. With traditional deploys, keep the previous build artifact.

Deploy in stages

If you have enough traffic, deploy to a canary environment first. Even deploying to a staging server and testing for 30 minutes before production catches most issues.

Automate the boring parts

Manual deploys have steps. Humans skip steps. A simple GitHub Actions workflow that runs tests, builds, and deploys is better than a perfect manual checklist that someone forgets to follow.

Database migrations need special attention

Backward-compatible migrations (add columns, don't rename or remove them) let you roll back application code without rolling back the database. This is the single most important deployment practice for preventing downtime.

Monitor after every deploy

Don't deploy and walk away. Watch error rates, response times, and key user flows for at least 15 minutes after each deploy.

When a deploy goes wrong: What to Do When Your Site Goes Down

DNS and Domain Management

The Most Boring, Most Critical Thing

DNS problems are devastating because they're total: if DNS doesn't resolve, nothing works. No amount of server redundancy matters if your domain points to the wrong place.

Domain expiration prevention

This sounds too basic to mention, but domains expire and take down entire businesses every year. Even Google accidentally let a domain lapse once.

Enable auto-renewal on every domain you own
Keep payment methods current — expired credit cards cause renewal failures
Set calendar reminders 90 and 30 days before expiration as backup
Use a domain registrar you trust (Cloudflare, Namecheap, Google Domains)
Monitor domain expiry dates with automated tools

DNS change safety

Lower TTL to 300 seconds (5 minutes) before making changes. If something goes wrong, the fix propagates in 5 minutes instead of hours.
After making changes, verify propagation across multiple regions before raising TTL back
Document all DNS records before making changes. Screenshot your current config.
Never change DNS records while distracted or in a hurry

Check DNS propagation with our free DNS Checker Domain expiry monitoring guide

SSL Certificate Management

The #1 Most Preventable Outage

An expired SSL certificate makes your site show a scary "Your connection is not private" warning. Users can't (and shouldn't) proceed. It's functionally the same as being down — except the error message makes you look incompetent.

Preventing SSL expiration

Use Let's Encrypt with auto-renewal. Free, automated, works on most setups. But "auto-renewal" isn't "guaranteed renewal." Things break silently:

DNS validation fails after a DNS change
The renewal script stops working after a server update
Certificate manager permissions change
Disk is full and the new cert can't be written

Monitor certificate expiry independently. Don't trust auto-renewal alone. Set up monitoring that alerts you 30, 14, and 7 days before expiration.

Certificate chain issues

Even with a valid certificate, an incomplete chain causes failures on some devices — especially mobile browsers and older Android devices. Your site works fine on your laptop but shows errors on a customer's phone.

After any certificate change, verify the full chain with an SSL checker tool.

Check your SSL certificate right now — it takes 10 seconds.

Free SSL Checker

Deep dive: SSL Certificate Monitoring Guide

Database Protection

Your Data Is Your Business

Database failures are the most painful type of downtime because they risk data loss on top of unavailability.

Automated backups

Daily at minimum, hourly if your data changes frequently. Test restores regularly. A backup that doesn't restore is not a backup.

Connection pooling

Your application should use a connection pool (PgBouncer for PostgreSQL, connection pooling in your MongoDB driver). Without pooling, each request opens a new connection. Under load, you exhaust available connections and everything fails.

Query monitoring

Slow queries cause cascading problems. A query that takes 30 seconds blocks a connection, other requests queue up, timeouts cascade, and suddenly your entire app is unresponsive. Monitor slow query logs and set alerting thresholds.

Disk space (again)

Databases need room to operate. Write-ahead logs, temp tables, and index maintenance all need disk space. A database on a full disk can corrupt data.

Managed databases are your friend. Services like MongoDB Atlas, PlanetScale, and AWS RDS handle replication, automated backups, and failover. For a small team, the cost is worth the reduced risk and operational burden.

Monitoring: Your Early Warning System

You Can't Prevent What You Can't See

Monitoring doesn't prevent downtime directly — but it catches problems before they become outages, and it dramatically reduces detection time when outages happen.

What to monitor

Uptime (HTTP/HTTPS) — Is your site responding? Check every 60 seconds from multiple locations.

SSL certificate expiry — Will your cert expire soon? Alert at 30, 14, and 7 days.

Domain expiry — Will your domain expire? Same alert schedule.

Response time — Is your site slow? Set a threshold (e.g., 3 seconds) and alert on sustained breaches.

User flows — Can users complete critical actions? Login, checkout, and signup flows should be monitored as multi-step processes.

Infrastructure — CPU, memory, disk space. Alert before you hit critical thresholds, not after.

The detection gap

Without monitoring, the average time to detect an outage is "whenever a customer complains." That could be minutes or hours.

With monitoring at 60-second intervals, detection time is under 2 minutes. The difference in impact (and customer trust) is enormous.

PerkyDash monitors uptime, SSL, user flows, and more. Start with the free plan or upgrade from €9.99/month.

Start monitoring now

Complete monitoring guide Monitoring frequency guide Why uptime checks aren't enough

Incident Response: When Prevention Fails

Because Prevention Is Never 100%

Even with perfect prevention, things break. The difference between a minor incident and a major one is often response time and communication.

Have a plan before you need it

Know who gets alerted — monitoring → notification → the person who can fix it. Reduce the chain.
Have rollback procedures documented — you won't remember them at 2 AM under stress.
Have a status page ready — when things break, communicate within 5 minutes. Don't leave users guessing.
Document after every incident — a simple post-mortem identifies what broke, why, and what prevents it next time.

The fastest resolution

For most indie products, the fastest path from "down" to "up":

1

Get alerted (monitoring)

~2 min

2

Assess the situation

~5 min

3

Roll back if deployment-related

~5 min

4

Communicate via status page

~2 min

Total: ~15 minutes from incident to resolution. Without monitoring, step 1 alone could take hours.

Create a status page in 60 seconds Incident post-mortem template Site down action plan

The Downtime Prevention Checklist

Copy This. Do It Today.

Infrastructure

Uptime monitoring active with alerts (every 60 seconds)
SSL certificate monitoring (alert at 30/14/7 days)
Domain auto-renewal enabled with valid payment method
Disk space alerts set at 80% threshold
Database backups automated and tested
Resource monitoring (CPU, memory, connections)

Deployment

Automated deployment pipeline
Rollback procedure documented and tested
No Friday deploys policy
Staging environment for pre-production testing
Database migrations are backward-compatible
Post-deploy monitoring (15 min minimum)

DNS & SSL

DNS records documented/backed up
TTL lowered before any DNS changes
SSL auto-renewal configured
Certificate chain validated
Domain expiry dates tracked

Incident Response

Status page ready (even if unused)
Alert escalation path defined
Post-mortem process established
Communication template prepared

Bonus

Chaos testing (intentionally break things in staging)
Dependency monitoring (track third-party service status)
Load testing before major launches/campaigns

Want a more detailed version? See our complete monitoring setup checklist.

Conclusion

Downtime prevention isn't about buying expensive infrastructure or hiring a DevOps team. It's about systematically eliminating the boring, predictable problems that cause 80% of outages.

Expired certificates. Full disks. Bad deployments. DNS mistakes. Unmonitored infrastructure.

None of these are exotic. All of them are preventable with basic tools and habits.

Start with the 80/20 list at the top of this guide. Set up monitoring. Enable auto-renewals. Automate deployments. Have a status page ready. Do those four things this week and you'll be ahead of most teams ten times your size.

Start Preventing Downtime Today

PerkyDash: uptime monitoring + status pages from €9.99/mo. Or try our free tools.

Start Monitoring Free SSL Checker DNS Checker Uptime Check

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the most common causes of website downtime?

The most common causes are expired SSL certificates, failed deployments, full disk space, DNS misconfigurations, and database connection exhaustion. Most of these are preventable with basic monitoring and automated processes.

How can I prevent my website from going down?

Set up uptime monitoring with alerts, enable auto-renewal for SSL certificates and domains, automate deployments with rollback capability, monitor disk space and server resources, and have a status page ready for when incidents occur.

How often should I check if my website is up?

At minimum, check every 5 minutes. For business-critical sites, check every 60 seconds from multiple geographic locations. Faster check intervals mean faster detection and shorter downtime.

What should I do when my website goes down?

First, assess the cause (check monitoring alerts and error logs). If it's a bad deployment, roll back immediately. Communicate with users via a status page within 5 minutes. After resolution, conduct a post-mortem to prevent recurrence.

Is 99.9% uptime good enough?

99.9% uptime allows approximately 43 minutes of downtime per month. For most small to medium businesses and SaaS products, this is a good target. Achieving higher uptime (99.99%+) requires significantly more infrastructure investment.

How to Prevent Website Downtime: A Practical Guide