Even the best websites with the most carefully laid continency plans don’t always achieve 100 percent uptime. There is, however, a vast difference between properly mitigated website downtime and instances of downtime that leave the world wondering how things could have gone so horribly wrong. For example, if a website goes down for a day due to a power outage, we wonder where the backup servers are and why they haven’t been implemented. Then we find out there were never any backup servers in place to begin with. That is a facepalm moment.

Last month we discussed how Amazon.com’s website went down due to a self-inflicted DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack that occurred when Amazon’s servers just couldn’t keep up with the annual Prime Day traffic – something we said might occur if Amazon did not properly ready itself for Prime Day the month before the previous blog post. Amazon, however, is not the only company that has ever suffered from a self-inflicted DDoS attack. In fact, chances of your website going down due to a self-inflicted DDoS attack are actually greater than suffering such an attack due to hackers.

On July 16, 2018 Amazon customers across the nation were looking forward to Amazon Prime Day specials. Other than Black Friday, there is no other day of the year that Amazon offers the kind of deals that Amazon offers to its Prime members during the annual Prime Day event. Last month we had discussed the caution Amazon should take to ensure there were no problems with overloaded servers or website downtime. Unfortunately, when Prime Day commenced, numerous customers saw Amazon’s dog pages (pages of pictures with actual employee dogs indicating there is a problem with the website).

Amazon’s famous Prime Day, which boasts deals that equal or surpass those found on Black Friday, is coming mid-month. Sources are saying deals will start July 16th and run through July 17th this year. In years past, customers have had frustration with slow-loading pages, while other pages did not load at all. Not only does this cause Amazon to lose sales on one of its biggest days of the year, but it causes serious frustration for customers in an “I want it now” mindset who feel that they are missing out on a limited-time deal.

Over the years we’ve discussed, in depth, why a website monitoring service is essential to the success of your business and why website downtime can be your business’s worst enemy. If you host your website on your own servers, you can take measures that others who use a hosting provider cannot. However, even those who use a web hosting service to host their websites should not be left feeling vulnerable and completely in the dark when things do go awry.

Recently (and in the past) we have discussed the importance of your website’s performance. From lost customers and pages that don’t convert well to a hit to your search engine rankings, performance really does matter. In the past we have discussed how to help with specific performance issues in general. Now we will look at the top seven issues that tend to affect website performance and could be causing your website’s performance to take a dive.

The speed at which desktop sites load has long been a factor in Google’s ranking algorithm, but recently Google announced that the page load time of mobile sites are now also going to be factored in when ranking sites in its search engine pages. We have previously mentioned that website performance, especially slowly loading pages, can have a detrimental effect on your online business. Now, not only are your desktop site’s page load speeds going to affect your Google rankings, but your mobile page load speeds may affect your rankings as well.

We all know that IT and website downtime cost companies money, but it doesn’t really hit you just how hard these numbers affect your business’s bottom line to until you see them spread out before you. While every business is different, the average cost of downtime for a large online business is in the millions. Here we break down just how much downtime can be costing your business, and what you can do to minimize that number.

We often discuss website downtime, why it’s detrimental to your business, what you can do to prevent it, and how to overcome it quickly when it does happen. However, website downtime isn’t the only issue that can have a negative impact on your online business. Website performance issues can hit you just as hard if you aren’t careful. Here we will discuss why website performance is just as important as website uptime, how to improve your site’s speeds, and how website monitoring can help you keep an eye on the performance of your site.

As we head into 2018 most businesses would like to achieve the ultimate goal of attaining zero percent website downtime in the coming year. The question remains, is zero percent downtime yet possible? While the bad news is that while you cannot yet control the inevitable, the good news is that you can take extra measures to ensure that your visitors have a way to accomplish what they wish to do when they visit your site and that your business can go on to the greatest extent possible at all times, no matter what is going on behind the scenes.