Uptime is a Priority for Every Business

uptime is priority for every business

 

Uptime is a Priority for Every Business

 

Uptime

In today’s highly competitive market, it becomes tough to stand out. Businesses are desperately struggling to get any advantage over competitors in your market space, even a small one. There is a lot of talk about speed, security, or cost, but an even more critical factor that web software companies don´t fully value: uptime.

 

What is uptime?

You may have already heard the word “uptime” at a conference or read it in an article. The uptime is when a web page stays connected online each day, and it is listed as an average percentage, for example, 99.7%. There is also its evil twin, downtime, which is the number of seconds, minutes, or hours that a website is not working, preventing users from accessing it.

Also, uptime is the best way to measure the quality of a web hosting provider or a server. If the provider shows a high uptime rate, it guarantees good performance.

 

Why should uptime be a priority for my company?

Consider what you’d feel if you tried to access a webpage on your computer, but it wouldn’t load. What would be your initial impression of that website? According to studies, 88 percent of online users are hesitant to return to a website after a negative first impression. What good is it to invest so much time, money, and effort on your website if no one visits it? What’s the purpose of working on a website if it doesn’t work when it matters most?

All hosting and server businesses often offer high uptime rates, but the trees do not obscure the forest. Although 99 percent may appear to be a large number, it indicates that your website may be down for over two hours over a week, which would be devastating to a heavily trafficked website.

When it comes to uptime, you must consider every second because you never know if a second of downtime could make a difference compared to your competitors’ websites. Those critical seconds result in a loss of Internet traffic, financial loss, a drop in Google SEO ranking, and a loss of reputation, among other issues.

Even a difference between 99.90% and 99.99% in uptime can be crucial. In the first case, your website would suffer downtime of 11 minutes per week, while with an uptime of 99.99%, your web page’s rest would be reduced to only one minute per week. It may cost more money to get that efficiency advantage, but it’s worth the investment.

 

Perfection is impossible

Despite what has already been stated, you must be aware that no one, not even the best provider in the world, can guarantee absolute perfection, especially since servers are still physical machines susceptible to external (hacking attacks, power outages, or natural disasters) as well as internal (human errors, DNS or CMS problems, hardware/software problems, server overloads) threats that can bring your website offline.

It would be best if you also remembered that these dangers are unpredictable events, and although we can prepare contingency plans, we will never know the exact moment when the threat will arrive. The world isn’t perfect, and your website won’t be up and running 100% of the time forever and ever.

It is also essential to understand that not all downtime is the same. For example, scheduled server maintenance from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. is very different and less damaging than an unexpected drop at noon. That is why it’s highly recommended to save and use backups of your website precisely for these emergencies and choose a good provider.

 

The best solution

The safest way that providers offer us to guarantee an excellent uptime is the dedicated server hosting as a service. You will enjoy full and exclusive access to the server, using all its resources to optimize your website to the maximum without having to share it with anyone.

You can configure your dedicated server hosting to your liking from the control panel (though make sure your provider also has 24/7 technical support for possible eventualities); you have more hosting space and capacity that you can use as you wish; you don’t have to worry about the hardware (which the provider takes care of), and they are flexible enough to manage high-visibility pages, reducing vulnerabilities.

Among other valuable tips, it would be an excellent idea to use a website monitoring service to monitor the performance of your site 24/7, receiving an immediate notification if downtime occurs. Additionally, this is a handy way to verify the reliability of your hosting provider’s warranties.

Another practical option is to use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to download the portion of your website’s content to servers that are closer to your users geographically. CDNs are very useful for increasing a website’s speed and, more importantly, reducing the number of events that cause downtime, thus freeing up space on your primary server and reducing tension. Check with your hosting provider to see whether a CDN is included in their package.

A dedicated hosting server may seem like a relatively expensive solution, but keeping your website online for as long as possible is worth all the necessary investments.

 

Conclusion

Current trends reveal tremendous pressure to maintain and improve high uptime rates, with sustained growth in demand over the last decade. In the future, experts hope that it will be possible to achieve an uptime of 100% since, with the arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT), this requirement will become essential for our daily lives.

A reliable hosting provider provides you with state-of-the-art server infrastructure and ensures a smooth performance of day-to-day business operations. Compared to traditional or shared hosting, which is resource-limited and lacks reliability, VPS hosting features a fully dedicated private server for your exclusive use. This makes it ideal for startups and médium to large businesses seeking an affordable eCommerce web hosting service in the US to fulfill their essential needs of running a successful online business.

One of the most common questions we’re asked at Protected Harbor is, “what kind of uptime can I expect from your hosting?” It’s not a wrong question — when choosing a hosting service for business, you want to know that your website or servers will be available.

We are the Uptime monitoring specialists. We monitor the uptime of your sites and applications to detect downtime before you or your users do. Contact us today to know how with a dedicated and experienced team, we deliver unmatched flexibility, reliability, safety, and security and exceed clients’ expectations.