More Helpful Tips for Maximizing Website Uptime

Here at Alertra we talk quite a bit about what to do when your website goes down. Of course an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so talking about maximizing your website uptime is just as important as knowing what to do when your site faces the downtime that every website owner dreads. If you want to avoid losing revenue for every minute your website is down, you need to know what to do to keep it up and running. We've given our readers some helpful tips in the past to maximize the uptime of their websites. Here are a few more tips to put into place to ensure that your site remains up and running and that downtime becomes less of an issue.

Reduce HTTP Requests

By now you should know that too many HTTP requests can cause a site to crash. While you don't want to reduce traffic to your site, you can still reduce HTTP requests without reducing traffic. How do you do this? By merging multiple CSS or JavaScript files into one file. The fewer files that need to be accessed, the fewer HTTP requests your website will receive.

Compress Data

We've discussed compressing images in the past to reduce the amount of data that your site uses. Another way to compress data is to utilize PHP5 applications. These applications can be used to compress JavaScript and CSS website data. When you use such software, you can place the JavaScript on the bottom of your website. Not only will this reduce the amount of data that your website utilizes, but it will also make your website load more quickly and run faster.

Outsource DNS and Email Hosting for Self-Hosted Sites

If you run a self-hosted website, get rid of two of the biggest problems that individuals who host their own websites face. Email and DNS services are integral to the success of your website. Getting them up and running is easy. Keeping them up and running is another story entirely. By outsourcing these services to quality providers you can reduce the problems and downtime that your site may face by hosting these things yourself. This will eliminate the chance of these two things interfering with your site's uptime and performance.

Utilize Website Monitoring Services

Oftentimes there are symptoms of a site outage before that outage occurs. Site performance is one of those symptoms. If the performance of your site suddenly takes a dive, you can be pretty sure that there is a problem that may result in a complete outage before long. If you have quality website monitoring service in place, you'll know when your site is experiencing performance issues and you can deal with the issues that are causing the dive in performance before it turns into a full blown outage.

Aim for 100 Percent Uptime

They may say that 100 percent uptime is impossible, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't aim for it. If you don't aim for 100 percent uptime, you're basically telling yourself that downtime is acceptable. Every minute of downtime equates to revenue lost, and lost revenue is something that definitely is not acceptable to a profitable business. Just because you've been told that something can't be done, doesn't mean you shouldn't try to strive for it.