Simple Steps to Help Maximize Your Website Uptime

Website uptime has become a prominent concern for many website owners. This is because businesses are rapidly beginning to understand that every minute of downtime equates to lost profits and lost credibility. In the world of the Internet, you can’t afford to lose either. The best way to maximize your uptime is to take steps to avoid downtime and have plans in place to handle it when it does happen. Believe it or not, not all instances of website downtime are caused by hosting providers. While your web host does play an important part in maintaining the uptime of your website, you also need to take some proactive measures to ensure that your website doesn’t face anymore downtime than it absolutely has to. Here are a few tips to help you keep your site up and running and accessible to your customers.

Make Sure Your Website’s Software is Updated

Almost all websites use a combination of plug-ins, scripts and other software elements. As the Internet evolves, so does the software. You have to make sure that you regularly update all components of your site to ensure that the software remains functional. If your site is running outdated software, it will likely lead to problems with the accessibility of your site.

Do Not Try to Set Up DNS on Your Own Servers

While it may be cheap and easy to set up DNS hosting on your own server, it may not be good for your website’s uptime. It is very common for websites to suffer downtime because their DNS servers have crashed. DNS hosting is very affordable and hosting with a reputable and reliable host, such as Verisign or easyDNS, can have a huge impact on the uptime of your website.

Put Website Monitoring into Place If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it really make a sound? This is an age-old question that the Internet has put to rest. If a website goes down and no one is around to check it, it’s still down regardless of whether you know it or not. You may not notice that your site has gone down, but chances are that at least a few potential customers have tried to access the site during the outage and they definitely know about it. How do you make sure you’re not the last one to know about your website downtime? Put website monitoring service into place. A good website monitoring service will keep an eye on your site 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and will notify you via SMS text message, email and phone that your site has gone down. Then you can get to work to make sure it’s up and running again as quickly as possible, minimizing any damage the downtime may cause.

Hire an On-Call Systems Administrator

You don’t have to be a huge corporation with a huge budget to have a systems administrator on call for when things go wrong with your site. If something small goes wrong at three in the morning and it’s an easy fix, it may be better to have your website monitoring service call your on-call systems administrator rather than disrupting your entire family. There are a number of companies that provide outsourced server administration. When your site goes down and your monitoring service lets your on-call administrator know, the company can respond to the server emergency while you stay sound asleep. If it’s a problem that requires your attention, your on-call systems administrator can contact you directly. These services are surprisingly affordable and can make a huge difference in the uptime of your site.

Constant Diligence

Maximizing your website uptime means constant diligence and proactive measures. Above are just a few of the steps you can take to ensure that your site experiences as little downtime as possible. Remember, even if you have to invest a little money into preventing and addressing website downtime, the investment can pay for itself by preventing you from being unaware of outages or not addressing outages quickly.