In the last few days I’ve heard of several entrepreneurs having challenges with their website/webapp where unexpected things are going wrong. While it has gotten much easier to build powerful websites, there are many more moving parts, and more subtle things that can break. What could go wrong on a site? Here are some examples:
- Network goes down
- Hard drive failure
- Web server failure
- Database failure
- Domain expires
- SSL certificate expires
- Page doesn’t render in a certain browser (IE is the usual culprit)
- Broken links (e.g. link to an external URL and that site changes their link structure without redirects)
- Slow loading pages and assets
- Third-party JavaScript causing pages not to load
- Third-party payment gateway fails (e.g. Authorize.net, Google Checkout, Amazon Payments, etc)
- Application functionality breaks (e.g. login fails, conversion path fails, etc)
- Distributed denial of service
- Spike in traffic
As you can see, there are many different issues that can arise with a site. One of the bigger challenges as well is that the traditional pinging services, which are very popular, only catch when the site is completely down, as opposed to when a specific piece of functionality like signing-in or a payment gateway is down. My recommendation is to recognize the complexity that goes into sites today and plan accordingly.
What else? What are some other things that can go wrong on a website/webapp?
David Cummings on Startups 
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