Name one thing that can kill an online business faster than you can say “Jack Robinson”.
That’s right, you guessed it: website downtime.
Every second that your website stays down, you’re unable to operate your business and collect cash. Compare it to a brick-and-mortar business.
If you were suddenly unable to access your grocery store, are you going to stick around for a few hours and wait for it to become accessible? Of course not — you’re heading down the road to a competitor!
That’s exactly what your prospective customers are doing every time that they land on your website and see that it isn’t operational. To prevent this customer bleeding from happening, you need to ensure that your website experiences the minimum amount of downtime possible.
In this article, we’ll go over everything you need to know about website downtime and how you can prevent it.
What is Downtime?
In order to understand how to mitigate downtime, it’s first important that you take the time to understand what downtime truly is and how it works. Downtime is a term that encompasses any amount of time where your website visitors are unable to access your website.
There are several things that cause downtime. One frequent cause is simply human error — accidental deletion of major website files or corruption of data can easily result in your website’s content being unavailable to your visitors.
Another cause is hardware failure. Back in 2010, Amazon experienced this en masse when one of the servers hosting its website physically failed, resulting in outages for most of its European customers.
Choose a Web Host with Low Downtime Percentages
The first step to mitigating website downtime is to choose a website hosting service with a very low downtime percentage. As a general rule, it is pretty much impossible to achieve a true 100% downtime. This is simply because mistakes and hardware failures are bound to happen.
However, your website host of choice should be committed to getting as close as humanly possible to that 100%. If your website host doesn’t list its average downtime over the last 30 days for its customers, then it’s time to look at other options.
Monitoring Website Downtime is a Must
The best way to mitigate the effects of website downtime is to constantly monitor your website to check that it is up. Use a website monitoring service to accomplish this. The right tool will send an email notification to your inbox as soon as it senses that your website is down.
That way, you can initiate the troubleshooting process ASAP, before the downtime has a chance to do serious damage to your business’s online reputation.
Keep Your Site Up!
There you have it — with this understanding of website downtime under your belt, you should have a much better handle on how you can keep your website up and servicing your customers every minute of every day!
For more website and business advice, be sure to take some time to check out the rest of the website!
