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For many online businesses, their website is more than just a virtual version of a brick-and-mortar store. It’s the only store with no physical counterpart. Also, websites need to perform reliably and consistently all the time. In the internet realm, “all the time” does not mean business hours of weekdays like that of a real store. “All the time” literally means all times available for our always-connected and always-online world.

Why?

Because any moment of website unavailability can potentially cost a business hundreds of times more than the service value of those lost moments. What does that mean?

Web hosting services are abundant and cheap. There are over 350,000 web hosting providers in the world, under the most conservative estimates, and the cheapest kind of web hosting service – shared web hosting – can set a company back just $3–$10 a month.

Do the math, and that’s less than a fraction of a cent per minute. But when a website goes offline, even just for a few minutes, the potential losses for a business that heavily relies on it are more than just cents.

We’re talking about at least a thousand times more than the cost of a whole monthly service – that’s for every minute offline.

Businesses that are based on data transactions are usually the hardest hit by web-hosting system downtime. Examples of these are e-commerce sites and financial services like banking. Studies estimate that regularly sized companies lose hundreds of thousands of dollars with every hour of downtime. Larger enterprises lose several millions with every hour of downtime. Big businesses that hit a system downtime occasionally hit the news.

Online retail giant Amazon had one during a sales promotion back in 2018. Several market sectors were unable to access important website functions, reducing the company’s sales figures by several millions.

Delta had an infamous website downtime back in 2016. The system downtime lasted only 5 hours, but the incident grounded 2,000 flights and cost the major airline 112 million dollars.

If a system downtime can cripple a corporation, imagine what they can do to smaller businesses. They can wipe out small businesses.

For smaller online businesses, their website is their only system. They don’t have the breadth of resources necessary for a purpose-built, separate back-up system, or a dedicated in-house IT department to take care of maintenance and repairs. Most of them entirely depend on their web-hosting service provider for all technical necessities.

But what is website downtime? How does it impact revenue? More importantly, what can digital entrepreneurs and small online businesses do to avoid website downtime?

Website downtime is when a website becomes unreachable or effectively unusable, like when it’s slow to load or only partially loads. Visitors expect sites to load in seconds and, according to studies, visitors leave a site if loading takes longer than 3–5 seconds. It’s a very narrow window to catch potential customers and lost opportunities account greatly for lost revenue.

Some websites offer businesses more than a platform for them to transact with customers. Many sites include business management functions like in-team communications, project management, customer relations, and data handling, to name a few.

Website malfunctions severely impact productivity and, in some cases, result in work stoppages. Revenue generation stops while overhead costs like utilities and human capital continue to accrue against the company.

With website downtime, business credibility and reputation suffer. Downtime weakens the company’s brand. Measuring the impact of downtime on a company’s brand is most difficult, but there’s no question about the lasting negative effect a tarnished brand has on sales and revenue.

To answer the last question about avoiding website downtimes, small businesses have a two-fold answer. The first is a bit obvious: choose a reliable web hosting provider. A reliable web hosting provider should be known for having a robust physical infrastructure, running on stable software systems, and one that’s manned by capable people. It should have sufficient system redundancies and back-ups, layers of security protection, and ample bandwidth or resources for allocation.

But even then, no machine is 100% perfect. Even the best among web hosting providers can only claim 99.97% uptime reliability throughout their whole service history. The 0.03% difference translates to over 12 collective minutes in a month. The industry average? 99.9%

As previously explained, every second counts. That’s why the second thing businesses need to guard against downtime is uptime monitoring. Businesses and their providers need to know moments of downtime as they happen. The sooner they’re known, the sooner they can be addressed.

When it comes to choosing the correct uptime monitoring service, one provider is already positioning itself as a leader: ProUptimeMonitor.com

ProUptimeMonitor.com provides minute-by-minute, round-the-clock uptime monitoring. It runs a comprehensive list of service tests to detect possible web hosting issues as they unfold.

Tests include network tests like pings, traceroutes, network speed tests, and other quality-of-connection types of network tests. ProUptimeMonitor.com performs website and web-hosting performance tests like load and response times, synthetic transaction tests, website component tests and so on. The company makes complete logs of all test results for the client’s perusal. More importantly, its system can be set up to provide clients service status alerts via email or SMS.

When a website’s normal functioning is critical to revenue generation, online businesses can count on ProUptimeMonitor.com to watch over for them at all times.

About the Company

For more of ProUptimeMonitor.com’s Uptime Monitoring products and services, please visit https://prouptimemonitor.com. For inquiries, send an email to [email protected].

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Website: prouptimemonitor.com