When Your Web Host Fails: Steps You Can Take to Recover Losses and Eliminate Future Downtime

Nothing can hit a website quite as hard as a bout of website downtime. Website downtime can lead to customer frustration, damage to your brand’s reputation, and significant profit loss. It can even wreak havoc on your website’s rankings in the search engines if left unchecked. If your web hosting provider is the cause of your website’s downtime, there are steps you can take to recover losses and eliminate unnecessary downtime in the future. To repair the damage done when a web host fails and causes your site to encounter downtime, make sure these steps are taken to prevent future losses and headaches.

1. Determine What Caused the Downtime

What was it that caused the downtime? A failure on the part of your hosting provider or did your website utilize more resources than your hosting plan allowed for? If the downtime occurred due to your site exceeding its plan’s resources, it’s time to upgrade to a different hosting plan. If it was a server issue on a shared hosting plan caused by the resources being utilized by another site on the server, consider changing to a dedicated hosting plan. If the downtime had to do with unacceptable maintenance times or issues that could have been prevented by your hosting provider, it may be time to switch to a different provider.

2.  Make Sure You Have Uptime Monitoring in Place

If you didn’t have uptime monitoring in place when the website downtime occurred, chances are that it took you longer to find out about the downtime than it should have. Make sure you have a quality uptime monitoring service in place, watching your site 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to ensure that you know about future downtime and performance issues the moment they occur so you can get to work more quickly to fix the issue. Every minute you reduce your downtime by equates to profits saved and customers retained. Uptime monitoring service can also help you determine if your hosting provider’s quality begins to slack in the future.

3. Put Contingency Plans in Place

When your hosting provider runs into a problem and the downtime is beyond your control, there are steps you can take to prevent significant damage to your business. Put contingency plans in place that allow you to keep your online business running until the issue is resolved. When your hosting provider runs into an issue that causes your site to go down, you can redirect your URL to a backup copy of your site, hosted with a different company, allowing you to continue business operations until the issue has been resolved.

4. Recover Losses with Discount Offers

When downtime occurs you lose profits and alienate customers. There is no way to prevent profit loss, but you can recover some of the losses and repair your customer relations by offering your customers a limited-time, one-time-use coupon code to make up for the inconvenience. This will not only drive more sales, allowing you to recoup some of the profits you lost, but the customers who were affected by the downtime will most certainly appreciate the gesture and will be more likely to forgive you for the inconvenience the downtime caused.

While you can’t go back in time and undo the damage done by website downtime, you can minimize future downtime and the damage it causes. You can also take steps to repair the damage done by the downtime your site did experience. By taking the above steps, you’ll be able to minimize future downtime and recover the losses you incurred due to any downtime caused by your hosting provider.