10/03/2016

Some of The Possible Ways to Combat Against Downtime Issues

Fighting against downtime issues is not new for businesses with online websites. Achieving zero downtime because is very tough because it requires to keep the site up through out the year continuously without a single interruption. Typically, websites go through disruptions for couple of hours when hosting provider schedules for regular maintenance. These planned downtimes are somewhat manageable as the business owners will have the opportunity to take precautionary measures and schedule it during off-peak hours. However, the actual problem occurs only when the site breaks down due to unplanned outages leaving negative impact on the businesses and customers experience. Diagnosing the source for the issue can be challenging because it can occur due to any reason. When the site becomes unavailable or slow performing during peak season, the impact on the online business can be truly devastating. It is not possible to put an end to this issue but can be minimized by following few measures.

Ensure Hardware and Software Functionality

At some point of time, every online business will likely experience hardware or software failure resulting in website disruption. The reason could be a network issue, a circuit breakdown, a hardware malfunction or even a power breakdown due to natural disaster. Or perhaps it could be a technical issue causing the server to shutdown. No matter what the reasons are, if downtime issues arise, then it is not only important to rectify the problem but also prevent it from recurring in future. While hosting providers need to resolve the issues that they are responsible for, the rest would lie in the hands of the site owners to protect the necessary components that are required to run the website smoothly.

Check on Hosting Provider

Hosting is another important factor that decides the site uptime. Despite many efforts to select a right provider, sometimes website owners choose the wrong hosting service and put their websites in unnecessary troubles. When dealing with low quality web hosting companies, there will be no reliability for uptime as a small server issue may take few days to get resolved. Some hosting providers keep the site owners blindfolded about the downtime issues and wouldn't even bother informing them when the site goes down. Having a constant check on the hosting service will determine whether these providers are keeping their promises on website uptime and performance.

Review Bandwidth and Hosting Plan

While choosing the hosting providers, many site owners get attracted to the wrong promises about unlimited bandwidths & disk spaces. Later, when site downtime or performance issues arise, they realize upgraded plans are required to meet the increasing demands of the website. Hosting plans with low price tags come with reduced capabilities, such as low bandwidths and less scalability. They have less ability to maintain quality at peak capacity. The site owners need to evaluate and keep a tab whether the current hosting plan is appropriate enough to the meet the demands of the website.

Monitor the Site for Uptime

Uptime is a metric that indicates the availability of website to the users. If the site has higher uptime percentage, then the site is more reliable. Hosting companies typically specify certain uptime rate but they are less likely reach those numbers in reality. Instead of relying completely on hosting providers, monitoring uptime statistics will help the website owners identify the performance issues. There are indeed some tools to monitor uptime but none of them can be as efficient as a comprehensive site monitoring service. A quality website monitoring service provider not only keeps a consistent check on the uptime statistics but alerts the site owners immediately upon any potential problem & performance issue before it turns into downtime event.