When it comes to website uptime, a “99.9% uptime guarantee” is often made by hosting providers. Sounds impressive – but is it really?
In reality, a website being “up” doesn’t make it functional to an end user. For example, if a homepage takes 30 seconds to load due to an overloaded server, this doesn’t count as a failure to meet the 99.9% guarantee – even though it’s rendering the website almost useless.
Worse still, because service levels are being met the site’s owners or the digital agency who manages the website will be none the wiser that something has gone wrong.
Website outages can happen for many reasons. Some are unavoidable – like the occasional major network failure – but many more are avoidable and can be managed with little care, appropriate configuration and forward planning.
But why is it so critical to have your sites up as close to 100% of the time as possible? There are a few reasons:
- Websites are the front face of a business, and give the first impression of an organisation’s quality. What does it say if your first impression is a broken website? Should a potential client click on your site and find it unavailable, they’re pretty unlikely to come back.
- Equally, many organisations rely on their website to perform business-critical functions. They may have clients who access the site as a part of their service delivery, and downtime creates negative brand experiences and major headaches.
- Sometimes, a part of a website fails, but the whole site doesn’t stop working. This is often not reported, as monitoring typically extends only as far as whether the site is up or down. This means that things like contact forms can fail to submit, and the site owner has no idea there was ever a problem or a lost opportunity.
We believe it’s critical to have an eye on site uptime at all times and know that your website is not only up but also working correctly, at any hour of the day.
At Managed Hosting Partners, we implement minute-by-minute monitoring (read more on our blog post here), so we know the second something has gone awry and resolve it as quickly as possible. It also means planning ahead and setting up the appropriate infrastructure to avoid such outages in the first place.
Further still, it means taking great care when moving a website to a new hosting setup. In the industry, it’s generally accepted that when you migrate your site, you can expect it to go dark for up to 48 hours – but it doesn’t need to be the case. With a concierge hosting service, you can successfully get your website migrated or new site online with next to no downtime (in fact, usually no downtime at all!)
