For most people downtime can be good if you plan ahead; you could take on a new hobby that doesn’t involve sitting and staring at your flat screen. But the kind of downtime that gets our attention is system downtime … and that is the kind of downtime you DON’T want to experience in 2019.
Throwing money out the window?
Downtime can be devastating for your business. An inadequate network will not only ensure stress and confusion for your staff and clients, it may also cost your company thousands and thousands of dollars in potential customers.
When your system is experiencing downtime, it means the network or server is unavailable, unresponsive, and not performing. Though downtime is sometimes unavoidable, it can be attributed to a variety of issues, such as malicious cyber threats and hacks, network outages, sudden overloads of website visitors (it doesn’t always pay to be popular), and even human error.
Downtime can also cause:
- Extra costs associated with additional work
- Interference with contractual arrangements
- Invoice interruptions
- Lost requests/communications
- Payment decreases
- Productivity delays
- Reputation damage
- Strained customer relations
Though measuring the exact financial cost of network failures is challenging, industry statistics suggest businesses of any size or industry can lose substantial amounts of annual revenue due to downtime.
The Ponemon Institute has taken one of the more recent stabs at this calculation through a national survey of U.S.-based data center enterprises.
Their findings concluded that one minute of unexpected downtime costs an average of $7,900, with a typical downtime period of just under 90 minutes.
This means an hour of downtime could cost a mid-to-large sized company $474,000 of business revenue in an hour. Such outages can yield adverse effects on small businesses too – costing them thousands of indispensable dollars.
Not cool.
The numbers are scary. But the more mindful a hosting provider is of why downtime occurs and the ramifications involved, the better prepared it can be with a solution. With proper maintenance management and adequate resources, incidents of system downtime can be mitigated.
Avoid the Crash & Burn
Overall, successfully maintaining server uptime requires maintaining a diligent watch of the system and strategic planning. Keeping an eye on all the moving pieces of virtualization and making sure it is operating according to plan is important. Properly documenting any sudden occurrences is a good strategy for handling not only near-term issues, but future crashes.
Aside from these, the best solution to maintaining site responsiveness lies with the servers, infrastructure, and knowledgeable engineers with troubleshooting skills.
Contegix's hosting capabilities include extensive server support, ranging from single server to multi-tier highly-available redundant architectures. Taking such measures promotes uptime and awareness, and ensures quick and effective measures take place in instances of unforeseen downtime. The essential combination of technology and knowledge will best prepare your hosting provider for such circumstances. With quality servers, infrastructure, and staff, your website will stay online and the revenue will keep flowing.
Better Prepare to be Better Prepared
You often can’t anticipate network outages, bandwidth overloads, cyber-attacks, or other technical snags that will render your system down. Though the unpredictable may damage your business reputation, customer loyalty, and revenue, it is important to remain more vigilant than concerned.
By emphasizing maintenance and resource management, as well as server and infrastructure know-how, your hosting provider will set a high level of expectation on responsiveness – allowing your system to experience more uptime.
So kick back and enjoy your personal downtime, leave it to the experts to make sure your site has no downtime. Contact us today.