As any website owner will know, downtime can be a nightmare. Every minute your site is offline, you are potentially losing revenue, tarnishing your reputation and damaging your search engine rankings. While web hosts have always implemented measures to minimise downtime, in this post, we explain how the use of AI is taking downtime prevention to new levels.
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Predicting issues before they arise
AI enables web hosts to detect issues that could potentially lead to downtime, allowing them to be addressed before an outage occurs. Using AI, server activity can be analysed in real time, identifying subtle changes in hardware performance, traffic patterns or app behaviour that might indicate an impending fault.
Additionally, by implementing machine learning, AI uses historical data to better recognise the early warning signs of a fault, such as unusual memory usage, failing disk health or unexpected spikes in CPU use. Crucially, when these issues are noticed, the system immediately takes action; for instance, it can adjust configurations or notify the support team before downtime happens.
Automating resource management
A potential cause of downtime is when a busy website lacks the server resources to handle all its traffic and crashes as a result. Today, some web hosts use AI to dynamically manage their cloud server resources, helping them prevent this type of downtime.
By monitoring fluctuations in website traffic, these tools can detect peak periods or unexpected spikes and automatically scale server capacity to ensure it can meet demand. For example, it can increase CPU, memory or bandwidth, or redistribute workloads across the cloud infrastructure.
The advantage over human scaling is that resources are added instantly and automatically, rather than being delayed by the need for manual input. This proactive approach ensures that websites maintain performance and remain online regardless of traffic.
Want to rank higher in search results? Read: How to Optimise Your Website for Core Web Vitals
Instant response to emerging issues
Another way that AI helps minimise downtime is that if a problem is detected, it can immediately take action to resolve the issue, without waiting for human input. Using automation, it can restart services, isolate troublesome processes or reboot the server.
AI can also implement failover procedures, sending traffic to alternative servers or even different data centres to ensure service is maintained. Moreover, as it can operate faster than human technicians, the length and impact of any downtime are considerably reduced.
Reducing human error
Human error, a common cause of website downtime, is being reduced by AI’s ability to automate set-up processes and support owners and admins with configurations. Operating in real time, it can instantly alert them to potentially risky actions before they’re implemented.
Typical areas where AI is able to help include checking software compatibility before updates are activated, ensuring that security best practices are implemented for user permissions or detecting misrouted traffic caused by incorrect DNS entries. More advanced AI tools even use machine learning to identify and block people from making erroneous changes to server settings or file structures that can take their site offline.
Discover other ways AI improves hosting, read: How AI Is Powering Smarter, Faster and More Secure Hosting
Preventing cyberattack downtime
Cyberattacks, such as DDoS attacks, malware infections (including ransomware) and hacking, are another common cause of downtime. The latest security tools, including intrusion detection systems, firewalls and spam filters, now utilise AI and machine learning to identify and prevent threats in real time.
Using behavioural analysis and threat modelling, AI can quickly identify malicious activity, including evolving and zero-day threats, enabling it to automatically block suspicious traffic or quarantine compromised files. As a result, the risk of security-related downtime is considerably reduced.
Improved disaster recovery
While AI reduces the potential for downtime, it doesn’t eradicate the risk completely. However, when it does happen, it is now being used to make disaster recovery faster and more effective. One way that AI speeds up restoration is by analysing backup integrity, for instance, it tests backups to ensure they’re usable while flagging issues that could hamper recovery.
Additionally, by using predictive analytics, AI can make recommendations about backup frequency, retention policies and storage locations, while helping website owners choose the most appropriate restore point. It can even automate the recovery process, eradicating technical difficulties and the potential for human error, ensuring a speedier and smoother recovery.
Need to find a reliable way to back up your website? Read: Website Backups – Why Cloud is the Best Solution
Future AI downtime benefits
As AI evolves, it will become even more beneficial for preventing downtime. There are already developments in self-healing infrastructure that enable server issues to be resolved without human intervention, while AI-enabled load balancing will be able to optimise traffic flow across global networks.
Owners can also look forward to intelligent caching, predictive scaling and smarter updates and patching. With the latter, this includes the ability of AI to automatically check core software, plugins and themes for bugs, conflicts and other issues, preventing activations that would cause website errors and downtime.
Conclusion
Web hosts are increasingly adopting AI to protect their customers from the consequences of downtime. AI’s ability to detect problems early, scale resources intelligently and respond to issues instantly means that the risk of poor performance or an outage is significantly reduced.
Looking for a web host that takes full advantage of the latest cutting-edge technologies and infrastructure to provide high uptime guarantees, exceptional performance and rock-solid security? For information about our full range of shared, VPS, dedicated server and cloud hosting solutions, visit our homepage.
