Website Downtime: Is It Possible to Attain Zero Downtime in 2018?

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.

Communication is Key

A huge aspect of minimizing downtime is planning for that downtime, and downtime is, unfortunately, an aspect that many businesses overlook. One of the most powerful tools that you have when putting plans for unexpected downtime into place is communication. How do you keep the lines of communication open when downtime hits?

First and foremost, you need to know the moment downtime occurs. That means having quality website monitoring service in place. This service will notify you via email, SMS text message, and phone the moment your site goes down. This allows you to go to work fixing whatever issues have occurred and communicating with customers from the moment the downtime occurs, if failsafes don’t immediately fall into place.

You should also utilize multiple hosting accounts as well as social media. Social medial will allow you to communicate any issues that your site may be encountering if you can’t immediately address downtime issues with your failsafe plans. You may even want to consider maintaining a dedicated social media channel for support-related updates so customers know exactly where to go to get updates about any downtime issues that may occur. This means that customers won’t be in the dark should any downtime occur. This also ensures that any and all downtime does not go unacknowledged and customer relations are maintained.

Testing Your Hosting Provider’s Redundancy

Make sure your hosting provider has redundancy measures in place including backup power systems and access to national and multi-national ISPs that guarantee network connectivity doesn’t go down.

While your hosting provider can boast about their iron-clad redundancy measures, the fact of the matter is that until you test it yourself, you can’t be sure that those measures really are as iron-clad as your hosting provider claims. It will be much less stressful on your business to discuss and solve a problem during testing than during a critical business period and heavy traffic. Also, be sure the host you choose is able to provide redundancy testing results for support utilities.

Get a Second Opinion Regarding Your Website Hosting

You may have complete confidence in the hosting provider and plan you have chosen and the provider may have passed your redundancy testing, but it is possible to overlook something when you are too close to the problem. Even if you have had the same hosting provider for years, now is a good time to get a second opinion. Seek out a qualified third-party consultant to gain a second opinion of the hosting system design to ensure that all parameters are acceptable. By getting a qualified second opinion of a trusted network engineer who comprehends your business as well as your IT needs, you will be able to ensure that adequate resources are in place in terms of your hosting plan.

Getting Ready for 2018

As we head into 2018, keep the above tips in mind to minimize downtime and, when avoiding downtime is impossible, to keep the lines of communication open with website visitors so that customer relations don’t take a hit when downtime does occur. While it still might not be possible to completely avoid downtime in 2018, we can avoid any damage to our business’s reputations due to downtime and can ensure we don’t face any unnecessary downtime in the coming year.