From Downtime to Uptime: Making the Most of Your Website When Times are Good

From Downtime to Uptime: Making the Most of Your Website When Times are Good

Every website owner dreads downtime, and with good reason. Downtime can not only hurt your sales if you sell products online, but it can also affect your reputation. If your customers cannot access your website when they need to, they may go to your competition instead.

It therefore makes sense to make the most of website uptime when you have it, as well as to do everything you can to reduce the amount of downtime you suffer from.

Make the Most of Your Uptime

When times are good and your website is up, make the most of it. This could involve running a new marketing campaign that is likely to see a lot of traffic heading to your site. You don’t want to do this when your website is down because you could end up spending a lot of money on directing targeted traffic to your site, only for the visitors to be unable to take any action once they arrive.

You could also direct your email newsletter subscribers to head to your website to take advantage of a new special offer when you know that you will not be suffering from downtime. For example, if downtime has been scheduled, make sure you send lots of visitors to your site when you know it will be up, otherwise they will be frustrated.

How to Reduce Downtime

There are a number of steps that you can take to reduce the amount of downtime that your website suffers from. The most important of these starts at the very beginning, when you choose your host. All hosts will provide a figure for the amount of uptime they have, and this will often be over 99%. But just remember that even 99.99% will still lead to a few hours of downtime each year. Is this acceptable to you?

Choose a host that promises the most amount of uptime, but also investigate the host’s claims yourself. Read online reviews and find out what previous and existing customers make of the claims.

You could also choose to go with a cloud-based host, and a secure host like one using IBM iSeries hosting could be ideal. Cloud-based hosting uses a network of servers rather than just one physical server for your website, so you are never relying on just one server. That means if something goes wrong with a server, your site should remain unaffected.

When you come to designing your website, don’t make the front end overly complex. This increases the chance of things going wrong, so use less JavaScript, for example, or fewer CSS files.

Use a DDoS mitigation platform, which helps to reduce the risk of becoming the victim of a DDoS attack. To also keeps your site up rather than crashing.

You could also use a content delivery network (CDN), where static files are delivered through web servers that are nearer to the physical location of the end user. This can lead to faster loading times and better all-round performance.

Make the Most of Your Uptime

Make the most of your uptime by ensuring you maximize it by taking the correct steps like choosing a reliable host. But also make sure you make the most of it when your website is up by running new marketing campaigns and directing more targeted traffic to your site.

Jack McDonald is an online tech guy! He is an engineer for a web hosting company and also runs his own business in his spare time. He writes for small business blogs, sharing some insider knowledge on hosting and related topics.