Is 99% Hosting Uptime Enough?
When you see a 99% guarantee, it’s usually a good thing. However, when you are running an online business that is running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year… you can’t afford to be down even just 1%? While 99% seems like a high number, the chart below really puts things into perspective at how long your sites or landing pages could be down over the course of a year.
It’s one thing if you have a blog or web site that is down, but the serious money is if your sales and landing pages are down. Not only can you lost money on paying per click, but there is almost no chance of that visitor coming back.
So what can you do? There are a lot of web hosting providers that gaurantee 99.99% uptime, but even in those rare moments when your site is down, there are also services available that can notify you once your site goes down.
I just recently got setup with ObservePoint, which monitors and notifies you when your sites go down. This week I was also doing some server work and transferred this blog and a few others sites to new servers. During the process, this site was down momentarily and I was notified by ObservePoint. An example of their notification system is shown below.
ObservePoint is just one of many web site monitoring services available. You can search google for “hosting downtime” and you will see a ton of different services. What I liked best about ObservePoint was I didn’t have to install anything on the server, and it was setup almost instantly. This may sound like a sales page, but ObservePoint doesn’t even know I wrote about this… just satisfied with their service and thought it would make for an interesting post on downtime issues.
If you’ve ever had an issue with downtime, or your site had a problem and no one bothered to tell you about it, a monitoring system can easily pay for itself in no time. OP also is offering a 7 day trial for anyone interested.