Your Business Website: The Importance Of Uptime
When starting up in business we should all learn the importance of uptime and take precautions.
Today’s business marketplace is a 24-hour environment; the onset of the digital age has created a hub where we can conduct business with all corners of the world. This in turn means that no consumer demographic is completely restricted geographically for the online company, as custom can come at any time and from anywhere. For this reason the stability of your business website is of utmost importance, and downtime can lead to a range of undesirable consequences…
Websites suffer downtime for a range of reasons. This can be down to malicious interference such as hacker activity on your website or server, all the way down to financial issues. If you’ve not paid your web hosting or domain name renewal bills then you’ll find your website in the dark until these issues are resolved. Other reasons that your website could go offline are as follows:
- Server outage
- Maintenance: routine or otherwise
- A spike in traffic
- Programming errors
- Copyright infringements
Should your website take a hit, the knock-on effects can be drastic in today’s business climate. Downtime can cost your business more than you ever imagined in both monetary value and business credibility.
Let’s put this into monetary perspective:
A study by Dunn & Bradstreet explored the effects downtime had on revenue in 2014. According to the study:
“59% of Fortune 500 companies experience a minimum of 1.6 hours of downtime per week. To put this in perspective, assume that an average Fortune 500 company has 10,000 employees who are paid an average of $56 per hour, including benefits ($40 per hour salary + $16 per hour in benefits). Just the labor component of downtime costs for such a company would be $896,000 weekly, which translates into more than $46 million per year.”.
This of course assumes that downtime would halt all working capabilities all together, but regardless of just what your outage affects, the losses your company can take will be significant.
So just how can website downtime affect your business?
- Revenue loss. As outlined above, the larger your company is the bigger the hit you’ll take should your website go down. This doesn’t mean that outages are more significant for larger companies though, as small- to medium-sized businesses are more likely to feel the knock-on effects of a loss in revenue as they strive to establish themselves as credible businesses.
- Migrating customers. In the business world it is reliability which will encourage many of your customers to make a purchase with you. If your website is down or unresponsive there are myriad alternative options for webizens to get what they want online.
- Damage to your brand. Your customers now have plenty of avenues to vent their frustrations with an unreliable website: their Facebook, Twitter and blog accounts are likely to feature a negative view of your brand should they find it hard to navigate or even locate your website.
Be sure to invest heavily in a resilient and reliable web hosting solution for your business website; it has never been more important for you to provide a consistent service for your online customers. Remember that customer loyalty can be fickle, and even the most long-serving customers will jump ship if your website starts giving them issues.
For those wanting to invest in a reliable hosting solution, a dedicated server could be for you. With a dedicated server you won’t be troubled by noisy neighbours draining your bandwidth allowance; your customers will be served with your website data at a speed you can be proud of.
Get started with your dedicated server now over on our website, and invest in some customer loyalty and brand protection.