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.

It’s no secret that monitoring your site for downtime is crucial to the success of that site. This is evidenced by the fact that there is an almost endless selection of service providers to choose from. When a service is in demand, companies will pop up left and right to fill that demand. The question you must ask yourself is which website monitoring service is right for you? Alertra customers know this and refuse to use any other company for their website and server monitoring needs. So exactly what is it that sets us apart from the pack?

In today’s day and age almost every single online business (and nearly all Internet entrepreneurs) understand the value of a quality website monitoring service. The problem is that oftentimes these professionals fail to see the big picture when it comes to the utilization of such a service. Some tend to be stuck in the mindset that a website monitoring service is nothing more than a means to measure a website’s uptime. The reality is that the benefits of such a service go far beyond this single feature.

If you operate or own an online business your website is at risk of being hacked, regardless of how large or small your website may be. Smaller businesses may think they are not a big enough “fish” for a hacker to focus on. The fact is that almost every single website online has something of value to be gleaned. Even if it’s just personal information or a mailing list, there is information that a hacker can use if you leave it open for the taking. Even if your business is a small craft shop, you’re at risk of being hacked.

You’ve come to realize just how much of a threat website downtime poses to your online business. You fully acknowledge the value and necessity of a website monitoring service to minimize your website’s downtime. The question is, how do you know which provider to partner with? How do you go about making apples-to-apples comparisons when so many different plans and promotions are being thrown at you left and right?

Sometimes you need to put monitoring on hold while you take care of things like system maintenance and server upgrades. At Alertra, we give you a couple of ways to do that - either by creating a regular maintenance window or by simply starting maintenance whenever you need it.