There´s No Upside To Web Hosting Downtime

Reliable web hosts will go to great lengths to make sure downtime doesn´t happen in the first place and they can minimize the impact it if does happen.

Time is money whether it’s uptime, downtime or anything in between. The internet has changed the way we access information as well as the way we buy and sell products and services. To be down, even for a few minutes, has the potential to cost a company thousands of dollars.  A site that is unreachable is useless to your customers.

The internet allows ideas and cash to flow freely from person to person, company to company and country to country. So when your pages go down, then your business, your bank account and your reputation can suffer. This holds true whether you are a huge corporation of a mom and pop home-run business. If you want to get traffic from search engines, you have to be present to win.

It’s a well-documented fact that web surfers have little, if any, patience for “pages not found” errors. When surfers click to your page and it is unavailable, they may conclude that you are out of business. This can be particularly tragic if a person is visiting your site for the first time. Every day around the world, countless sales and clients are lost through web server downtime or email services errors. For some businesses, downtime can be a financial catastrophe. For example, a company in the shipping and transportation industry can lose as much as $28,000 an hour while brokerage houses can lose as much as $6.4 million per hour.     

Downtime can be broken down into three distinct categories:

• Planned - normal downtime that is planned and scheduled well in advance.
• Semi-planned - Includes software and hardware updates that are scheduled, but not entirely by your company. An example might be when a vendor releases security patches that must be applied quickly to avoid vulnerability. This schedule is largely driven by others.
• Unplanned - Events that force immediate downtime, such as hardware/software failures, operator error by an administrator, malicious acts, disasters.

Most customers understand and grudgingly accept that some degree of maintenance is required and some small amount of downtime is necessary to maximize the potential of a website. You and your web host can minimize the negative impact of any amount of downtime by using maintenance windows and user-friendly messages.

Reliable web hosts will go to great lengths to make sure downtime doesn’t happen in the first place and they can minimize the impact it if does happen. You can work with your host to make sure your site is always up and running at its maximum potential. Be sure to check your web hosting company's uptime guarantee and restrictions policy, so if there is downtime, you will know ahead of time what, if any, compensation you will receive.

Most people associate downtime with weak wireless signals, network snafus or equipment trouble. However, according to the research firm called Gartner Group, 80% of all unplanned downtime is caused by people and process issues, not hardware issues.

For SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) that have limited budget resources and overtaxed staff, throwing money at infrastructure improvements with products and services might temporarily solve the problem but doesn’t usually provide a long-term solution.

“You must have a holistic view,” says Troy Dixler, director of network solutions for the Forsythe Business Consulting Group. “Instead of stovepiping the network guys and making them responsible for small, specific tasks, you have to look at the connections among all folks involved in making sure there’s no downtime.” Customers often operate on very small margins and any revenue loss that may be caused by your system’s downtime will immediately cut into their bottom line.

No matter how much effort your department puts into a cutting-edge web site project, if your customers can’t see it, the money is wasted. For many companies, web site downtime is one of the biggest technology money drains they encounter. Even if a site that has statistically “good” uptime of 95% is down for 438 hours every year. These 18 days of dead air can be devastating to any company, but especially those that depend on their sites for incoming revenue.

Talk to your web host about the best ways to protect your site from downtime. If a customer (especially a new customer) knocks on your door and nobody’s home, they will leave and they probably won’t be back.