Website Stability and Overcoming Downtime and Optimizing Performance in the SSL Era. Ensuring Reliable Website Uptime, Tackling HTTPS Challenges, and Releasing the Power of Secure Online Experiences.
Redirect blog articles to HTTPS – SSL and redirect posts. Very good and free website uptime monitoring service.
I’ve had some issues with my blog lately, as it goes down multiple times every day. It can go down as many as ten times a day. The downtime doesn’t last very long, just a few minutes, but it’s very frustrating.
For uptime monitoring of my blog, I use a free service called “Uptime Robot,” which checks my blog every five minutes. Of course, there’s also a paid option that checks the website’s uptime every minute.
Uptime Robot isn’t the most reliable way to verify if everything is fine with your hosting because it has had a history of giving false positives due to overloaded servers for the free service.
Also, things have changed, and now there aren’t as many false alerts about my blog being down because they have added more hardware and, most importantly, when the system detects that your site is down from one location, it rechecks it from another location before sending you an email notification.
In fact, Uptime Robot didn’t even need to tell me that my blog wasn’t loading because it happened to go down while I was writing articles, and I was notified in the WordPress interface that the connection was lost, as well as when I tried to access it. Not only me, but other friends who visited the blog also experienced the issue.
Considering that the settings were similar to the previous hosting company, where it didn’t go down for months, except for occasional server restarts, I started looking into my hosting company.
I asked them why it was going down so frequently. They checked it, made some modifications, started monitoring it themselves, but it still went down.
Someone from the company told me that they noticed in the .htaccess file that the HTTPS redirect script wasn’t closed properly.
To redirect articles to HTTPS after installing the SSL certificate on my blog, I use the fastest method, which is a redirect script placed in the .htaccess file and looks like this:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
</IfModule>
I found the script online, from a guy who copied it from his hosting company, a fairly large one. I also noticed that it wasn’t closed properly, meaning “</IfModule>” was missing, but I thought maybe that’s how it should be.
If it wasn’t closed there, it would be closed at the first “</IfModule>”, and the rules of the W3 Total Cache plugin would be mixed in between, causing a mess. It’s likely that the script was running in an infinite loop, causing the error when the Apache web server crashed.
Closing the script seems to have solved the problem, as my blog hasn’t gone down even once in the past three days. I believe that was the issue. I’m glad it wasn’t the hosting’s fault because I was afraid I had moved from one bad hosting provider to another, having already paid for a one-year subscription and passed the 30-day refund period. I don’t think it was the hosting’s fault, and the guys there really made an effort to resolve the issue for me.
I noticed that my blog hasn’t gone down for three days because I’m now using another website uptime monitoring service in addition to Uptime Robot, which checks my blog every minute. I want to recommend it to you.
It’s called “Uptime Doctor,” and the fact that it checks your blog every minute, for up to five sites, is a big plus that is usually only offered for a fee, not for free. It’s also good because it sends you daily and monthly uptime reports for your blog. Additionally, I haven’t noticed any false positives so far.
Setting aside the blog’s uptime and HTTPS article redirect, I’ve noticed that the caching doesn’t work as well since I installed SSL on the blog.
During a speed test on the Pingdom server in Sweden, I observed that the blog loads in about one second compared to half a second before implementing SSL. The other blog, which doesn’t have SSL, loads in 500 milliseconds, so the same as before. Of course, these results are only from an external perspective, on the server in Sweden. In Romania, the loading speed is just as fast, with no major differences.
What are your experiences with website downtime and SSL implementation? Have you encountered similar issues with blog performance after enabling HTTPS? We’d love to hear your thoughts and any tips you have for maintaining a reliable and secure website. Share your experiences and insights in the comments below!