Downtime is when your business website and other digital resources are unavailable or out of reach for the customers and clients in need. It is when your servers have powered down and can no longer provide the level of service you would expect from them. A DDOS attack has rendered your servers and computing infrastructure incapable of customer service.
It can also be considered downtime, as customers cannot access your services. Only the hordes of bots used by hackers to wreak havoc on your information systems will be connected to your servers. Downtime makes it impossible for your business to render the services and experiences that your customers are looking for. This makes customers unhappy and dissatisfied with the services they get from your online business. It also leads to many low ratings from unhappy customers who will often write scathing reviews of your online business and the kind of services and experiences they are getting. This isn’t good for your overall online reputation as a business, and whenever there is downtime, your business cannot deliver the products and services its customers need.
Downtime
To avoid further losses, modern businesses can work on keeping their downtime low and maximizing their uptime with every available bit of processing power they have. Uptime is the opposite of downtime and precisely what the modern business needs. Downtime can be bad for businesses and restricts the usage of resources available to clients, for example. Better uptime means your business is available to customers for more hours of the day, which translates into more opportunities and sales on the internet.
A good business should always try as much as possible to keep its services available on the internet. Availability leads to engagement which eventually leads to conversions, and as an online business, how you avail the services your customers need impacts your overall performance significantly. Generally, good availability means customers will not have difficulty reaching you and accessing your services.
There will also be an increased number of transactions on your website when you have dedicated your time, effort, and resources to building the best infrastructure to keep your services on and available to your customers. Better engagement is also made possible with uptime and continuous availability for online businesses. With this engagement, your business will easily understand your customers better and come up with means of delivering better experiences and services for your customers on the internet.
Unavailability is painful for online businesses and makes their daily activities more complicated and time-consuming. Downtime is toxic for business and should be treated with the utmost seriousness. A downtime of an hour usually leads to millions of dollars in losses and can even take a business out of action altogether. Downtime makes your business services not accessible to your valuable customers, and you will not be doing them any service while you are offline and your website is unavailable.
Businesses and Downtime
Businesses online and downtime are two things that do not match and will not be seen walking together any day. For the online business, downtime means not delivering customer services in the manner expected from them and a lack of proper and reliable business delivery at the end of the business. It is a sign of an online business not being responsible enough to keep its services running and its website and web applications available to its customers and clients.
Downtime impacts businesses and should not be treated lightly, as it can harm how efficiently we can run modern businesses and how customers perceive your online business. Whenever customers try to visit your website several times to be met with a 404 error, they will be less likely to give your website more visits in the future.
With low downtime, online businesses are more available to provide good services and experiences to customers. Reliability for your business can be crucial, especially in times of high demand. When closely monitoring your downtime and uptime, you’ll be able to deliver better customer experiences. Avoid losses by keeping your uptime high and reliable enough to provide all-time availability for your online business.
Businesses on the internet must be keen on downtime, or it will impact their profitability, business efficiency and even overall productivity. Businesses that fail to keep their uptime high usually end up losing out a lot, and in the long run, sustainability and ease of maintenance become challenging to manage. Often, good uptime means you will be keener on your business and able to monitor and manage its online performance more effectively.
SLAs and Uptime
SLAs are the service level agreements web hosting providers and cloud service providers guarantee for their services. Some will give you a percentage of a few decimal points from complete efficiency, while others will give you less. Cloud providers also provide customizable SLAs to cater to the needs of your startup or small online business. SLAs are provided as agreements, and whenever you launch services on your cloud infrastructure, you’ll be able to perform and deliver much more impressively.
Downtime and How to Keep It Low
One way to manage downtime is by distributing your server load over several servers. This arrangement means your servers can hand over requests when they are filled with activity, and this will improve the overall availability of your online business by quite a lot. The cloud lets you do this easily thanks to computing instances that can be started and stopped anytime.
These can be automated for your business to make it easier to stay online and available to your clients, customers and other persons of interest. With this, staying online will no longer be a matter of if but when your online customers and other visitors require you. There are some ways to start scaling up your online business, but the following cloud providers will be an excellent way to get started.
- Google Cloud
- Microsoft Azure
- Linode
- Ali Baba Cloud
- IBM Cloud
All of them provide your business with on-demand, scalable computing so you can more effectively deal with rendering the best online customer experiences for your valued and esteemed clients.
