Re:This is putting the cart before the horse. (Score 1)

+1 to Wrexs0ul's comments. Additionally, Some of the pieces of information that would be good to have with anyone competent you speak with. Analytics of some sort – google, etc: this would tell you much more in depth info about the 1000’s of people hitting the site at one time. Peak times, etc. This _may_ be able to provide you with times and/or relationship to the frequency of the 503’s. Current hosting/architecture specs – virtual machine, shared webhost, physical box? Stats to get an idea of the performance currently. Static pages or dynamic content? If dynamic: Client side javascript? Hosted locally or on remote locations? Server side? Php? Ruby? Python? Any web Frameworks in place? Web server used: Apache, IIS, NGINX, lighthttpd, other? Access to httpd logs? This would be able to definitely tell you the frequency and spread of the 503’s from which to start establishing an pattern. Single or multiple servers? What applications are running on them? Any server monitoring in place? Database server? How is content updated? How much content is online (filesize)? What kind of backups are in place and are they verified/tested? What attempts have been made by the nonprofit or the provider to heal the current issues? Is there a theory in place as to the cause?