When it comes to ensuring success online, most website owners would agree that zero downtime is the ultimate goal. Unfortunately, zero downtime, as in no downtime whatsoever, is a goal that can never be achieved. There are measures you can take to minimize downtime, but completely eliminating downtime is out of the question. While this isn’t the ideal answer that many hope for, it is a fact of life in a world of software and hardware errors, third-party failures, and maintenance issues, among other factors.

Travelling is stressful in and of itself. When traveling, you commonly get to look forward to long lines for checking in your luggage, longer lines to weave your way through security (while waiting for the people in front of you to get their shoes back on), and trying to time everything just right so that you can make it to your gate on time to board your flight without waiting at that gate for hours. Widespread downtime that could cause delays and add stress to the travel experience are not something that any traveler wants to deal with.

Literally anyone who owns or operates a website has come to understand the importance of maximizing uptime and keeping track of your website’s downtime and performance. However, as almost all hosting services are now including uptime statistics in their plans, some people have fallen to believe that the need for partnership with a quality website downtime monitoring service is no longer a necessity. This faulty logic couldn’t be further from the truth, however.

Anyone who uses Facebook, WhatsApp, or Instagram knows that Facebook suffered a major Internet outage this March and many are frustrated with the way said outage was handled. What happened? How could Facebook and its affected apps go down for such a long period of time? What should have been done differently? March’s Facebook fiasco is a perfect example of how you should never handle website downtime or a so-called server configuration change.

This year an increasing number of websites will be aiming to achieve a goal of 99.9 percent uptime or more, ensuring that their visitors always have access to their sites. However, while businesses are gaining a better understanding of downtime and web hosting providers are working to minimize downtime on their end, it is important to understand that in 2019, downtime is still a threat that can lead to damage to a company’s bottom line or even to the failure of a website venture altogether.

We often discuss the many reasons why downtime causes unwanted headaches for online businesses. Those who have been paying attention recognize that website downtime equates to increased customer frustration, decreased consumer confidence, and eventually a serious hit to a business’s bottom line. However, while most professionals do agree that downtime is the bane of all online businesses, many are still taking a reactive approach to fighting website downtime rather than taking a proactive approach.

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.