What is Your Business Uptime?

Have you ever spent time surfing the Internet and found a website of your interest? You decide to take a look at it only to find that the website is not working properly or completely offline? What did you think?

I would think the business is unreliable and will most likely not to buy its products or services. After all, there are probably many other business(s) that offer the same or similar products or services. After all, the back button for me to get back to the search results and jump onto another business' website is just 1 second away.

Ensuring as much uptime as possible is essential for doing business online.

Say, your website went down for a few hours and 100 visitors could not get to your website. You may think that you've only lost 100 potential visitors that could turn into customers.

WRONG!

You have lost 100 visitors plus countless other potential visitors that the 100 visitors could refer your business to (their referrals).
You have gave away 100 visitors to your competitions. You have also gave away their possible referrals to your competitions.
Yes it's quite serious if you think about it...

Even worse, the 100 visitors that you lost could tell their friends and families that your business is unreliable since they couldn't reach you when they wanted to.

Of course I might be exaggerating a little, but hopefully I can bring enough attention to you on the importance of your business' uptime.

What Can You Do

As a business owner, you need to know how much bandwidth and web storage space are provided with your web hosting package. And continue to monitor the bandwidth generated from your visitors does not exceed the bandwidth that you're allowed to have. Also, if your website's database can grow on its own (i.e. blogs and forums' database expands as visitors post comments and threads), make sure you have enough space available for its growth.

It is a good practice to make sure that your website is bug-free. When users experience errors, the level of unreliability of your business grows exponentially! As a business owner you need to surf around on your website frequently and make sure everything works from customer's perspective.

Not Only Your Website Has to be Up All The Time...

You as a business owner has to be able to jump in and work all the time. Yesterday we had a power outage when I got home and I could not work on my blog for the entire evening. The connection between my blog and I was disconnected. I did not have a backup plan...

Even though it was not critical for me to maintain my website during the power outage, but who knows if, in the future, something critical comes up in an event like power outage. Having a backup plan is essential.