99% Uptime: We live in a world where your website uptime is vital. And you cannot afford your website being offline several hours a year. The internet is changing, but only because we are changing. Every year we do our shopping and check our emails online more frequently, that results in a pressure for greater standard online.
99% uptime is not that great!
Imagine if one of your customer is planning to buy one of your products on your website, and suddenly the server goes down and the customer is now only facing a white screen with the message “404 page not found” written all over.
There are two major problems with this scenario, first will the customer ever visit your site again to buy your products or services. The answer is probably yes, at least most of the time. But some of your customers who experience this type of error message will automatically think “this site is not active, I will check another website” or “this site is broken”.
With these kind of thought in his or her head you just lost a customer. Another aspect of this problem is that the customer no longer trust you or your products or services. The funny thing about a business is that it’s about a bigger perspective. If your website doesn’t work, why would your products or services?
For a business owner this may come as an unrealistic surprise, but the customer trust you as much as they trust your products or services, and not least the way you present them.
How much is it?
99% Uptime
A lot of web hosting services are now providing web hosting with a 99% uptime. Doesn’t that sound amazing and great? But when you think about it, and if you use a little math it’s not all rainbow and sunshine. Lets break these numbers down and reveal what it is really about, shall we?
99% Uptime in time
First of all lets make one thing clear, it is not especially hard for a web hosting company to provide 99% uptime. And you should not leave this “article” without knowing how much it really is.
99% uptime = 3.65 days of downtime each year
Or 7.20 hours of downtime each month
Or 1.68 hours of downtime each week
Well that’s great, or is it? Lets get down to business. We can establish that when your website is down your customers cannot buy your products or services. Let’s suppose your business income is only based on the one you make from your website, it means:
If you have a hundred visitors 1 of them will not be able to buy from you.
Your business would make one million a year, it now makes 10.000$ less.
1 out of 100 times, you will not be reachable through your website.
Also means 1% more angry or confused customers.
When you see the problem from this perspective, you see it through an entrepreneur’s eye. Suddenly 99% uptime isn’t that great, at all.
How to prevent downtime?
If there is something the internet business owners should have learned by now is that “What you pay for, you will get”. If you decide that your website will be hosted on a cheap server, your service will be cheaper. And is that really what your business stands for, crappy service?
You should get a reliable web hosting service that can meet your market demands. I am afraid that’s the only way to prevent this problem. If you do the math you will see that by spending a couple of more dollars each year, you will gain more out of your online based business.
How to know your downtime?
The problem with downtime is that it’s hard to know when your website actually is down. I mean what are the odds that you will visit your website when it’s actually down, hey I have done the math for you: 1 to 100. There is a simple solution for this, and yes it is free.
There are some companies that provide something called website monitoring. It’s a service that helps you keep track of your website uptime and downtime. Basically what it does is that the service “pings” your website and when its down, you will get an email or a text message to your phone.
You can get free website monitoring service from https://uptimerobot.com/
