DNS Uptime, Backup Hosting, Website Monitoring Services, and Failover Support

The issue of DNS uptime is often a topic that is ignored until something happens to your website. When you set up your website, you are likely focused on the look of the site and the site's content and SEO rankings. Downtime, however, is an issue that you should also take into consideration before the inevitable happens. You need to ask yourself what you can do to ensure that your site experiences minimal website downtime. You need to ask yourself whether or not your site is capable of handling surges in traffic. You need to consider how you will handle downtime due to things such as configuration errors or even natural disasters. If you haven't put the following three measures into action, your site is more vulnerable to downtime than it should be.

1. Do You Have Backup Hosting in Place?

Whether you manage your DNS internally, have a shared hosting plan, or utilize dedicated hosting services, you need a backup hosting provider in place. If, for some reason, your primary host goes down, a secondary hosting provider will allow you to divert your traffic to a working version of your site. You just need to make sure your site's settings are directed to the backup host's IP address during the website outage.

2. Do You Have a Website Monitoring Service in Place?

If you aren't using a quality website monitoring service, you run the risk of being the last to know when your site goes down. It's impossible to keep an eye on your website uptime 24 hours a day, seven days a week on your own. This is why quality website monitoring is crucial to any online business. If your site goes down at one in the morning, your website monitoring service will contact you via phone and/or SMS text message to ensure that you're aware of the outage. You won't have to wait until you're up and at your computer to learn of the outage yourself.

3. Do You Have Failover Support in Place?

Do you know what you'll do if your website does go down? What will happen if your website monitor contacts you at two in the morning, alerting you of a site outage? Notification of such an outage will do you no good if you don't have failover support in place. With the right failover support in place, your website traffic can be diverted to another IP address. When your site is back up and running, your site will be diverted back to your primary host. By ensuring proper failover support, you ensure that your customers (and your profits) aren't affected when your primary host goes down. No matter which provider you choose for website hosting services, chances are that your site will encounter downtime. How you handle that downtime and what you do to mitigate the damage will directly impact how your customers are affected and exactly how much money your site loses due to the outage. If you want to ensure the continuity of your site, you need to be sure you put the above measures into place before downtime occurs.