Imagine it's late Saturday night and your cell phone is ringing. You answer the call. It's your boss and she's very upset that the website is not working. Do you know what you are going to do? How are you going to respond, quickly?
Without question, one day you are going to have a problem with your website. You need to be as prepared as possible for that day. A little bit of time spent in preparation can make all the difference between a 15-minute outage and a 6-hour (or worse) outage.
This series of articles will help to prepare you for that day. We are Support Engineers here at Acquia. We spend every day assisting clients with websites in crisis. We would like to share what we have learned.
If your business depends on this website, then you are responsible for the site. It does not matter who you are, even if you are just a manager, or if you've hired other people to handle the website.
You should have an overall basic understanding of the "flow" of transactions. If your not "technical", this basic understanding will help you figure out who can help.
Take a look at the diagram below.
There are different types and levels of Web hosting available today. You could be on a very simple plan where everything is on one box (left), or you could have very complex hosting with a database server separated from several Web servers (right). Those servers could be sitting behind a load balancer and Varnish. You could also be using a CDN (content delivery network).
It makes a difference!
A more complex site has more points of failure. Having an understanding of your Web stack, and the flow of requests, will make it easier to troubleshoot.
We will discuss this in more detail in a later column.
If it isn't obvious enough, most of what we've mentioned here isn't technical at all. These items are more clerical in nature and tend to be ignored because, honestly, they just aren't fun. They are time consuming and borderline boring. But the importance of these tasks outweigh all the reasons why you might put them off.
Got that? Good, because now that we have all these out of the way, we can proceed to the more technical issues in our next article.
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Fri Sep 12 2025 07:00:05 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)