We live in a digital world, and staying connected is not an option, it’s a necessity. In this interconnected era, you can’t even switch off for a minute. In terms of website hosting and maintenance, website uptime matters the most.
Website uptime is the time when the website is live and available to use for all visitors. It is when something causes the website to go down is when the downtime arrives. The web is a place where most companies and other entities seek to build professional relationships and have more clients. It builds a strong reputation and gets more customers. Website uptime ensures that this process goes smoothly.
Without a website that runs smoothly and invites visitors, your business can get into major damage as people will be disappointed and turn away. This term ‘uptime’ has been used by website admins for a long time, and it still matters the most to site managers and business owners.
Downtime matters for hosting providers:
Hosting providers are based on a service which ensures that the website of their clients will keep running, no matter what happens. This is how a hosting company markets itself and gets new business. If the said hosting provider is not able to commit to the number one selling point of their business, they will get a bad reputation.
Downtime is like a nightmare for hosting providers. It leads to losing customers trust, moreover, pushes their service in the shadows. Even one incident is enough to tarnish the image of your hosting services. Here is why the website goes down:
Traffic:
If your hosted website is being visited by a lot of people, it will lead to a traffic spike. Traffic spikes are great for business, but only when they are backed by solid hosting. A hosting provider who has the means to manage this traffic spike is the true champion of website uptime management. You just have to guarantee that the site keeps running and the flow of traffic is directed to all site pages without hassle.
Maintenance:
Maintenance is crucial for the wellbeing of your business and for each client who has trusted you with their website uptime. Even the smallest websites need regular maintenance, be it a local florist or a multi-store website. This will cause the website to go to downtime, and the visitors will be a little frustrated. The best way to deal with this is to put a banner on the site that it will be back on after maintenance at ‘xyz’ time, so your customers are well informed.
Cyber-attacks:
This is a sad reality of today’s interconnected world, and cyber-attacks are growing in number. As more websites go live every hour, cyber miscreants look for ways to disrupt the healthy cycles for their mischievous reasons. This causes websites to go down, and a hosting provider should not be at the receiving end of this nightmare. While individuals and businesses are using the — best VPN — services that are out there to secure their internet connections, a hosting company must implement strict security protocols on its end to prevent spyware attacks. Otherwise, you will lose customers.
Coding issues:
Poorly programmed websites also go in downtime and cause a frenzy. This also causes a heavy load on the hosting servers and results in a bad situation. As a result, the site becomes unresponsive.
In addition to the factors mentioned above, other things can also affect a website’s uptime. However, they are less common.
Downtime is costly:
If your sites have faced a downtime, you are not alone. Most major websites have gone down due to many errors. But it causes a loss to your business every minute the site is down. When Amazon went down once, they lost $66,240 on each minute of the downtime. Calculate this loss in hours, and it puts a major dent in the company’s overall profit.
Get a third-party audit service:
Fortunately, some services can keep a check on the health of your hosted websites. For example, Sagent is a 3rd party audit service that monitors your equipment and with precision tells you the efficiency of your network and if any equipment requires replacement or repair.
Third-party services can audit your site and inform you of any red flags. You can stay updated and alert and save your customers from the costly downtime.
Create logical backup routes:
While 100% uptime is not possible in this world, there are things you can do to ensure 99.9% uptime. Creating backup routes is one of those tips. Since no system is perfect, you can create multiple routes for your API. Even if one path is down, the other can be taken to provide a seamless loading experience.
Nowadays, there are cheap solutions as virtual servers, so you can just create redundant servers to back an API gateway and reduce friction.
RAS:
IBM calls this model as reliability, availability, and security. Many methods have been devised to ensure RAS for uptime, like data backups, uninterrupted power supply, and automatic updates. Planned maintenance services also ensure a longer uptime. Any system is prone to failure, so redundancy is the key through which you can ensure RAS in any service.
Last word:
Hosting providers have to prioritize uptime as their top concern during service. If you don’t have server capacity, you should not get more clients. New solutions are continually rising and saving the day for hosting providers, and the tips mentioned above will work wonders for your business as well. Ultimately, you need to decide which factors affect your uptime and how to put an end to the troublesome factors.
