Minimizing the Downtime of Your Website

As we discussed last week, 0 downtime is an impossibility even with the best team, tools, and resources. However, it is possible to drop your downtime from over 8 hours a year to under one hour a year if you put certain practices and measures into place. This week we will discuss some of the things you need to do to minimize the downtime of your site and ensure that you achieve as much uptime as possible.

Work with a Quality Website Monitoring Service

If you aren’t doing so already, you need to employ a quality website monitoring service to get a handle on how well your website is performing and how much downtime you are incurring. When your site goes down, you need to know about it the moment it happens and not minutes later. The sooner you know about downtime, the faster you can address it and get your site back up and running. In some cases you will be able to avoid downtime altogether if your website monitoring service alerts you to performance issues that are indicative of looming downtime in the near future. A quality website monitoring service is one of your top tools in your arsenal against website downtime. Talk to Your Hosting Provider about Network SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and the Setup of thee Hosting Infrastructure What exactly is your hosting provider’s SLA (Service Level Agreement) and how exactly is the hosting infrastructure of your hosting provider set up? Can you live with both of them and do both offer your site enough protection from unexpected downtime. Furthermore, do you need to optimize your site’s infrastructure for availability and security? If the answers aren’t to your liking, you may want to look at a better hosting solution, even if it is more expensive. The price is worth it to minimize your site’s downtime.

Talk to Your IT Department and Systems Administrator about Your Setup

If your company is large enough to have its own IT department and systems administrator, talk to these key employees. Discuss gaps in support. Find out who can provide managed support in the event of a crisis. You want your failsafes in place before an episode of downtime occurs. You don’t want to be scrambling for solutions while your site is down for the count.

Review The Software Your Site is Running and Consult Provider Websites

Look at the software your site is running and ask yourself a few questions. Does the software add value? If not, let it go. It is just another thing that could possibly go wrong with your site. For the software you need, does it fit with your IT support? If not, you may need to look for another solution. Do you have the latest versions running? If not, it may be time to upgrade. Finally, consider not only the cost of the update itself (if there is one) but the cost of the downtime that will occur while you install that update and see if the numbers make sense.

The Bottom Line

Ensuring maximum website uptime is no small tasks, but if can hedge against website downtime it is time and money well spent. Especially when you realize that not only does your site lose profits when it goes down, but it also loses credibility and customer confidence.