If your website keeps going down — even briefly, even occasionally — there's a good chance the problem is your hosting rather than anything to do with the website itself.
The most common cause: server resource competition
Cheap shared hosting puts hundreds of websites on the same server. When another site on that server gets a spike in traffic or runs a heavy process, it pulls resources away from everyone else. Your site drops, loads slowly, or becomes temporarily unavailable — and you have no visibility into why.
We've had clients come to us after years of putting up with this. Their website wasn't being prioritised with server resources, and it was showing. Repeated downtime that they'd been told was "just one of those things." It isn't — it's a hosting problem with a straightforward fix.
Other causes of repeated downtime
- Oversold shared hosting: Some budget hosts oversell their server capacity significantly. The advertised spec is never what your site actually gets.
- No resource monitoring: If the host isn't actively monitoring how resources are allocated, problems go unnoticed until users report them.
- Plugins or updates crashing a site: On WordPress, a bad plugin or theme update can bring a site down. Without backups and monitoring in place, recovery takes longer than it should.
- Domain or SSL issues: An expired domain or lapsed SSL certificate can make a site appear down even when the server is fine.
What good hosting does differently
The hosts we use — Krystal for WordPress and custom sites, and Cloudflare for our managed starter sites — take resource allocation seriously. There's no overselling, there's active monitoring, and our clients get uptime they can rely on.
We also set up uptime monitoring on sites we host, so we know about problems before clients do.
Changing hosts isn't complicated
If your site keeps going down and you're unhappy with the support you're getting, moving to a better host is usually a clean, straightforward process. Read more about what to look for in a website hosting provider or get in touch with NC Digital to talk about managed hosting.