Minimizing Website Downtime with Website Monitoring Service

IT budgets tend to be shrinking, and that is a fact of life that many businesses just have to deal with. What can be controlled, however, is what a company does with the money it does have. While implementing redundant systems may not be within a company's budget at the moment, monitoring the systems that are in place is a crucial step toward protecting a company from the losses it may suffer due to unplanned website downtime. If you want to minimize the lost profits that website downtime can cost, there are certain steps that must be taken and certain policies that need to be put into place.

Planned Downtime

Planned downtime that occurs due to things such as updates and maintenance is, to some extent, under your control. You can plan that downtime around the hours that your website experiences the least amount of traffic, so any profit loss will be minimized. You can also notify customers of the planned downtime ahead of time so they can make purchases or do business accordingly. What that leaves you with is unplanned downtime, and how you prepare for that downtime can mean the difference between the failure and success of your site.

Website Monitoring Service is a Must

When it comes to minimizing profit loss due to website downtime, the name of the game is speed. You have to know about the downtime as soon as possible so you can go to work fixing the problem in a timely manner. That means implementing a website monitoring service to alert you the moment any website downtime happens. The sooner you know about the downtime, the sooner you can go to work to get your site back up and running.

What to Do When You Are Notified of Downtime

So you have quality website monitoring service in place. You receive a text message or a phone call telling you that your site has gone down. How fast you get that site up and running depends on a number of factors including the reason for the downtime, what failsafes you have in place, and the attitude of your IT staff.

If your website monitoring service notifies you of downtime that is being caused by your hosting provider and you have backup hosting in place, you can simply redirect your DNS. If your website monitoring service notifies you of downtime caused by a software or hardware failure on your end, you are going to need your IT department to fix the problem as quickly as possible. The attitude that the employees have regarding downtime will have a significant impact on how quickly they work to get the site back online.

Training Your Employees Properly

When you train IT employees, you should drill into them the fact that fixing downtime is priority number one. No matter what else may be on their plate, no matter what else they may be working on, fixing the downtime needs to come first. If you have employees who wear multiple hats and are not solely dedicated to IT, this is especially important. Those employees need to know that their other responsibilities come second to ensuring that your site is accessible to customers.

Have You Put Website Monitoring Service to Work for Your Business?

There are very few things in this world that are certainties. The fact that your site will indeed at soe point experience downtime is one of these certainties. Add it to death and taxes. The question that remains is how quickly you will learn of the downtime when it happens so your company can go to work resolving the issue. If you have quality website monitoring service in place, then the answer to that question is, "In just moments." If you do not have website monitoring service in place, then there is really no way to know and you put the profits and reputation of your online business at risk.