As we head into 2018 most businesses would like to achieve the ultimate goal of attaining zero percent website downtime in the coming year. The question remains, is zero percent downtime yet possible? While the bad news is that while you cannot yet control the inevitable, the good news is that you can take extra measures to ensure that your visitors have a way to accomplish what they wish to do when they visit your site and that your business can go on to the greatest extent possible at all times, no matter what is going on behind the scenes.

Now that the holiday season is here, it is even more crucial for many online businesses to avoid downtime and capture as much of the incoming seasonal traffic as possible. If you were to go to your favorite store during the holidays, or really any time of year, only to find that the doors were locked and the lights were off when the store should have been open, what type of impression would that leave you with? It is the same impression that consumers get when they try to visit a website that is inaccessible or not performing properly when they want to do business with that website.

We all know that downtime can be deadly to the success of an online business – especially one that is just starting up. We can put tools in place, such as a quality website monitoring service, to let us know that downtime is happening the moment it occurs. This allows us to get to work to resolve that downtime as quickly as humanly possible, but shouldn’t we also be taking it one step further? Shouldn’t we be on the lookout for the common pitfalls of website downtime so we can help avoid it altogether whenever possible?

In today’s Internet-driven society we all know how crucial website monitoring is in avoiding unnecessary downtime. We also know that avoiding downtime is necessary to the success of any website. However, that knowledge is often only skin deep and stops with those two facts. Here we will discuss the many facets of how downtime can affect your business and why tools, such as a quality website monitoring service, play such a crucial role in helping your website attain its full potential in regard to online success.

Nowadays it’s par for the course for organizations to use software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings for things like file sharing, appointment scheduling, customer service management, and a number of other end-user operations. But what happens if the SaaS vendor that you use suddenly folds and is no longer there to support the services that your business and your website have come to rely on? While it is rare, it does happen and you need to prepare for the worst to prevent such a scenario from causing a crisis within your organization.

Amazon’s AWS S3 service offers hosting for images, entire websites, and the backend for apps including popular smart-home apps such as Nest. As of February 2017, Amazon’s S3 web-based storage service was experiencing wide-spread issues – issues that were leading to services that were either partially or fully broken on hosted sites and disruption of the apps and devices which depended upon those services. So, what was the official word for what was causing the outages? It came down to a lot of tech-speak.

If your business is storing significant amounts of unstructured data, you absolutely must make sure that your storage is built to handle the specific challenges that you are sure to face in the future – namely scalability. Fortunately, there are now systems designed with new modular architectures that “future-proof” your online data to ensure it doesn't all come falling down due to scalability issues. The question is, which one is right for your business? Here are the things you absolutely must consider when storing large amounts of unstructured data on the Web.

From unexpected spikes in traffic to massive DDoS attacks, 2016 saw more than its fair share of  major bouts of website downtime. As we all become more and more aware of the threats that such downtime pose to our businesses, it would seem that these episodes of downtime would fall to the wayside. If 2016 is any indication, however, downtime is just as prevalent as ever.

When it comes to doing business on the World Wide Web, uptime is a major factor that is a very prevalent concern behind the scenes. When downtime occurs, a nasty domino effect can occur along with it. First, customers can’t access the website. Then, sales are lost. If the site is down too long, eventually your Google rankings can take a serious dive affecting future traffic and revenue. As such, anyone who actually manages and runs a website understands how important website uptime is.

Most website owners and managers know that website downtime can indeed affect your search engine rankings as far as Google is concerned. With Google dominating the search market with about two-thirds of all search engine traffic, it’s no wonder website owners can be frenzied into a panic when they think about any amount of downtime affecting their hard-won search engine ranking. However, what many don’t realize is that a short bout of downtime doesn’t automatically mean that your Google ranking will suddenly take a dive.