The issue of DNS uptime is often a topic that is ignored until something happens to your website. When you set up your website, you are likely focused on the look of the site and the site's content and SEO rankings. Downtime, however, is an issue that you should also take into consideration before the inevitable happens. You need to ask yourself what you can do to ensure that your site experiences minimal website downtime. You need to ask yourself whether or not your site is capable of handling surges in traffic.

Being blacklisted from the search engines is one of the worst possible things that can happen to an online business. It has been estimated that more than half of all website traffic is generated through search engines. If your site becomes blacklisted, you lose access to all of that traffic. Being blacklisted can literally bankrupt an online business. To prevent this from happening, you need to understand what being blacklisted means, what can put you at risk of being blacklisted, and how you can prevent it from happening.

As consumers become increasingly demanding in regards to what they expect from a website's performance, more and more website owners are beginning to realize the importance of quality website monitoring services. Back in the days when most shopping was done in brick-and-mortar stores, a friendly staff providing excellent customer service was the key to a business's success. Nowadays, with a good percentage of transactions being conducted online, the role of the friendly salesperson has transitioned into the role of a website that offers performance and reliability.

There is nothing quite as stressful as seeing your site go offline – especially if all of your business's profits are driven by your website. While downtime is, for the most part, an inevitable fact of life, there are steps you can take to minimize the downtime your site experiences. The following three steps will not completely eliminate downtime, but they will help ensure that you are taking proper measures to maximize your site's uptime.

When looking at hosting options for your website, you can go with shared hosting or you can go with dedicated hosting. The difference is that when you opt for a shared hosting plan, you share the server that your site is hosted on with other websites. When you go with a dedicated hosting plan, your site is the only site hosted on the server. While shared hosting is a cost-effective option for start-ups and small business websites, there are some things you need to be aware of when it comes to shared hosting plans and website downtime.

YouTube is known for many things. Website downtime isn't one of them. The site did experience a global outage, however, going down Thursday morning for a couple of hours before services were restored. Because YouTube outages are so rare, it sparked a buzz in the online community. Twitter members were speculating that the site had been hacked. There was no word from YouTube, however, regarding what actually caused the site's downtime.

As technology advanced and the Internet became a crucial part of doing business, many did not anticipate that website downtime would actually become an increasingly-common problem. After all, if the uptime of your website is critical to your business's bottom line, downtime should be anything but acceptable. Unfortunately, it seems as though website downtime is indeed becoming the rule rather than the exception. If you do business online, it's important to understand why website downtime is becoming a growing concern and why it seems to be getting worse rather than better.

Cyber Monday is right around the corner. Is your site ready for the traffic it is about to receive? If your business is running Cyber Monday promotions, there are some steps you need to take to ensure that you don't miss out on making the biggest sales of the year.

Here at Alertra we often discuss the importance of using a reliable hosting company. If your host's servers go down, you want to ensure that the company will take the necessary steps to get your site up and running as quickly as possible. Even outages that last a few hours can cost your company significant profits and can cause you quite a bit of frustration. What if you were to experience an outage that lasted days? That's exactly what has happened to some Dreamhost customers, and the online community is abuzz.

When it comes to doing business online, website downtime can cause your business to lose credibility before it has even had a chance to establish itself. The HealthCare.gov site is a perfect example of this fact, as Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testified before a House committee regarding the malfunctioning of the website and its rocky beginning.