HTTP Error 503 (Service Unavailable)

A searcher finds your website on Google and clicks to see “Service Unavailable”.

Next time they will not click on your website again.

Because searchers are looking for answers but if your website has errors, they won’t trust your brand to give the answers.

If your website has a 503 Service Unavailable Error, find out the cause to stop losing potential visitors.

These errors tell you what happened to your website, but don’t tell you why.

So, in this article we will learn about 503 errors and the solutions.

Let’s dive right in.

What is a 503 error?

A 503 Service Unavailable Error is a generic error message that tells you that your web server is working, but can’t handle the current request.

These HTTP response status codes don’t tell you why the issue occurred.

Your visitors also land on this error page when your website has a 503 Service Unavailable Error.

How to fix a HTTP error 503?

• Restart your server
• Is your web server going through maintenance
• Fix firewall configuration faults
• Go through your server-side logs
• Find bugs in your website’s code

Restart your server

Servers that host your website can be congested.

To fix this:

• Simply restart your web server
• If your website has multiple server hosts then restart them all

Is your web server going through maintenance

Web servers shut down when they go through maintenance.

To fix this:

• Go to your server’s administration settings
• Check scheduled automatic maintenance sessions on the configuration options
• Disable automatic updates in the configuration options to control server maintenance

Fix firewall configuration faults

Your website’s firewall protects it from malicious visitors or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

Your firewall configuration can reject the content delivery network because it thinks it’s a server attack, which results in a 503 Service Unavailable Error.

To fix this:

• Check your firewall configuration

Go through your server-side logs

Server-side logs come in two types:

• Applications logs
• Server logs

Application logs are your website’s history, showing:

• Web pages requested by visitors
• The servers your website connected to

Server logs is information about your server’s hardware like details about:

• Health
• Status

Go through both to find information about your server or website.

Find bugs in your website’s code

Your web server can’t answer requests from a content delivery network if your website’s code has errors.

To fix this, either:

• Go through your code to find bugs

Or:

• Copy your code into a development machine

Because copying your code into a development machine:

• Debugs your 503 Service Unavailable Error
• Helps find the exact moment the error occurred

Conclusion

When your website has an error.

Fix it as soon as possible.

Because if visitors see errors.

They won’t come back to your web page.