Are You Utilizing a Website Monitoring Service to Minimize the Damage Caused by Website Downtime?

No matter what type of website you operate, whether it is a multi-million dollar ecommerce store or a small, monetized personal blog, downtime costs your business money. It isn’t just lost sales you need to worry about, however. Website downtime also costs your business precious customer satisfaction levels and brand reputation in the cut-throat environment that is the Internet. No matter what niche or industry your website operates in, competition is fierce and you need to make sure you stay ahead of the pack in terms of customer satisfaction and brand recognition. Here are some things you need to consider if you have yet to put a quality website monitoring service to work for you.

What is Website Uptime?

What exactly is website uptime and what does it mean to your business? Uptime is the percentage of time that your website is up, running, and available to visitors. When shopping for a hosting provider, most people will notice that the majority of providers guarantee a specified percentage of website uptime to ensure that the infrastructure of the hosting company can support their website, applications and other critical content and resources. Many website operators put a lot of stock in these uptime guarantees, since only working servers are able to drive profitable websites. When a server goes down, the sites hosted on that server are essentially closed for business.

What Kind of Damage Does Website Downtime Cause?

Website downtime can result in an array of damages, most notably of which is a loss of profits. Website downtime can cost the typical website as much as $5,600 per minute (or $300,000 every hour). The specific dollar amount per minute that downtime will cost your business will vary depending on the nature of your site and the amount of profit it generates. In addition to lost sales, downtime can result productivity losses when an outage causes employees to go without access to necessary resources and missed opportunities to connect with customers.

What Causes Website Downtime?

There are a number of factors that can lead to website downtime. Common causes of downtime include human error at the data center, failure in the network area supporting the services, and environmental issues like power outages or inclement weather. Software and hardware failures as well as hackers and malware can also lead to downtime occurrences.

How Does Website Downtime Affect Your Customers?

While website downtime definitely has an impact on your site’s profits, it also has an impact on your business’s customer satisfaction and customer retention. When your site becomes unavailable or under-performs, customers become frustrated. Those frustrated customers may seek out a competitor site to fulfill their needs. When a need arises in the future, that once-loyal customer may go to your competitor’s website instead of going to your site first as they used to.

Minimizing Website Downtime with a Website Monitoring Service

Even with your hosting provider’s uptime guarantees in place, website downtime is inevitable. The most effective way to protect your online business from the havoc that website downtime can create is to implement the help of a quality website monitoring service. A website monitoring service will notify you of the downtime the moment it happens, ensuring that you and your team can go to work to get the site up and running as quickly as possible, keeping the time of the outage to a minimum. These services may also be able to alert you when downtime is about to occur, looking for telltale signs that something is awry with the site, and notifying you of the issue so you can correct it before your site goes completely dark. With a website monitoring service watching your site 24 hours a day each and every day of the year, you can rest assured that you will know about any website downtime the moment it occurs so you can take the steps necessary to minimize the damage and profit loss caused by dreaded downtime issues.