In a perfect world 2018 would have seen website downtime become a thing of the past. The fact of the matter is that as websites become more complicated and increasingly dependent upon third-party services, downtime isn’t going to become a thing of the past anytime soon. If we learned anything in 2018, it taught us that website downtime is still a very real struggle, even for the biggest sites on the Web. Here are 5 things that 2018 taught us about website downtime.

At some point in time, every singe website has to go down due to maintenance. Whether you’re upgrading an aspect of your site or fixing an existing issue, website maintenance is going to bring your site down while that maintenance is occurring. The length of maintenance downtime will vary from site to site and update to update, but one thing remains consistent – you need to ensure that any downtime your website encounters due to said maintenance is as painless as possible for both you and your visitors.

Even the best websites with the most carefully laid continency plans don’t always achieve 100 percent uptime. There is, however, a vast difference between properly mitigated website downtime and instances of downtime that leave the world wondering how things could have gone so horribly wrong. For example, if a website goes down for a day due to a power outage, we wonder where the backup servers are and why they haven’t been implemented. Then we find out there were never any backup servers in place to begin with. That is a facepalm moment.

Last month we discussed how Amazon.com’s website went down due to a self-inflicted DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack that occurred when Amazon’s servers just couldn’t keep up with the annual Prime Day traffic – something we said might occur if Amazon did not properly ready itself for Prime Day the month before the previous blog post. Amazon, however, is not the only company that has ever suffered from a self-inflicted DDoS attack. In fact, chances of your website going down due to a self-inflicted DDoS attack are actually greater than suffering such an attack due to hackers.

On July 16, 2018 Amazon customers across the nation were looking forward to Amazon Prime Day specials. Other than Black Friday, there is no other day of the year that Amazon offers the kind of deals that Amazon offers to its Prime members during the annual Prime Day event. Last month we had discussed the caution Amazon should take to ensure there were no problems with overloaded servers or website downtime. Unfortunately, when Prime Day commenced, numerous customers saw Amazon’s dog pages (pages of pictures with actual employee dogs indicating there is a problem with the website).

Amazon’s famous Prime Day, which boasts deals that equal or surpass those found on Black Friday, is coming mid-month. Sources are saying deals will start July 16th and run through July 17th this year. In years past, customers have had frustration with slow-loading pages, while other pages did not load at all. Not only does this cause Amazon to lose sales on one of its biggest days of the year, but it causes serious frustration for customers in an “I want it now” mindset who feel that they are missing out on a limited-time deal.

Over the years we’ve discussed, in depth, why a website monitoring service is essential to the success of your business and why website downtime can be your business’s worst enemy. If you host your website on your own servers, you can take measures that others who use a hosting provider cannot. However, even those who use a web hosting service to host their websites should not be left feeling vulnerable and completely in the dark when things do go awry.

Recently (and in the past) we have discussed the importance of your website’s performance. From lost customers and pages that don’t convert well to a hit to your search engine rankings, performance really does matter. In the past we have discussed how to help with specific performance issues in general. Now we will look at the top seven issues that tend to affect website performance and could be causing your website’s performance to take a dive.

The speed at which desktop sites load has long been a factor in Google’s ranking algorithm, but recently Google announced that the page load time of mobile sites are now also going to be factored in when ranking sites in its search engine pages. We have previously mentioned that website performance, especially slowly loading pages, can have a detrimental effect on your online business. Now, not only are your desktop site’s page load speeds going to affect your Google rankings, but your mobile page load speeds may affect your rankings as well.

We all know that IT and website downtime cost companies money, but it doesn’t really hit you just how hard these numbers affect your business’s bottom line to until you see them spread out before you. While every business is different, the average cost of downtime for a large online business is in the millions. Here we break down just how much downtime can be costing your business, and what you can do to minimize that number.