IT budgets tend to be shrinking, which is a fact of life that lots of businesses just have to deal with. So what can be controlled, however, is what a company does with the money it does have. While implementing redundant systems is probably not within a company's budget at the moment, monitoring the systems that are in place is really a crucial step toward protecting an organization from the losses it could suffer because of unplanned website downtime. If you need to minimize the lost profits that website downtime can cost, there are specific steps that must be taken and certain policies that need to be placed into place.
Planned Downtime
Planned downtime occurring due to things such as for example updates and maintenance is, somewhat, under your control. It is possible to plan that downtime round the hours your website experiences minimal quantity of traffic, so any profit loss will be minimized. You can even notify customers of the planned downtime in advance so they can buy things or conduct business accordingly. What that leaves you with is unplanned downtime, and how you prepare for that downtime can mean the difference between the failure and success of one's site.
Website Monitoring Service is crucial
With regards to minimizing profit loss because of website downtime, the name of the game is speed. You should know about the downtime as soon as possible so you can go to work fixing the problem regularly. That means implementing a website monitoring service to alert you the moment any website downtime happens. The sooner you know about the downtime, the sooner you can go to work to really get your site back ready to go.
What to Do WHILE YOU ARE Notified of Downtime
Which means you have quality website monitoring service set up. You receive a text or a phone call telling you your site went down. How fast you get that site up and running depends on several factors including the reason for the downtime, what failsafes you have in place, and the attitude of your IT staff.
If your site monitoring service notifies you of downtime that's being due to your hosting provider and you have backup hosting set up, it is possible to simply redirect your DNS. If your website monitoring service notifies you of downtime the effect of a software or hardware failure on your end, you will need your IT department to fix the problem as fast as possible. The attitude that the employees have regarding downtime could have a significant impact on how quickly they work to find the site back online.