Are Cloud Services Endangering Your Site's Uptime?

A number of today's websites rely quite a bit on external cloud services. Many websites utilize a number of external services that make up different components of the site. For example, the third-party advertising and social media controls that you integrate into your site may be hosted on cloud services. If any of the resources that your site uses crash, it can significantly hinder your site's performance and appearance or, even worse, bring your site down entirely. Amazon is a perfect example of what can happen when cloud services go bad. The outage that Amazon experienced this year proved to the masses that no cloud service is too big to fail. GoDaddy outages proved the same thing. The bottom line is that if you are counting on cloud services to keep your site up and running, you may find yourself in the dark with a website outage that you have no way of controlling. Since website downtime equates to lost revenue, you need to ask yourself just how much you actually trust the cloud service providers that you are putting your faith in. After all, you are ultimately putting the fate of your website in their hands.

Should You Avoid Cloud Services?

The fact of the matter is that there are cloud services that are just too valuable to your site to ignore. What you do have to do is make yourself aware of the fact that these services can, and do, fail at times. When the big ship sinks, your site will go down with it if you're not careful. So what can you do to prevent cloud services from taking your site down? First, make sure that you have a website monitoring service in place. Altera customers know the moment something goes awry with their websites. When you are notified that your site isn't performing as it should be or, worse yet, that your site has gone down entirely, you can look to see if the cloud services that your site utilizes may be behind the event. If the cloud services are indeed to blame, you may need to disable those services until they are back up and running to ensure the continuity of your site. It's virtually impossible to monitor the uptime of your site and these services on your own. It's crucial that you utilize website monitoring services to prevent cloud services from impacting your site's revenue.