24X7 Monitoring: Is Your Website Downtime Just an Inconvenience or Something More

In this unpredictable world of technology and internet, downtime is a common and inevitable problem. But this should not be ignored or accepted. And your website going offline again will make your IT team spring into action trying to sort the issue as soon as possible. The reason is that the impact of downtime doesn’t affect only the revenue, but also various areas of your business that will ultimately affect the bottom line in ways that you may not have even anticipated. Well, if you are in the ecommerce industry, then chances are high that you have lost millions of dollars within that short time span and yes this is not an overstatement. A 24x7 web monitoring service can surely help.

Today, more and more web hosting companies are offering a 99.99% availability to ensure that their customers can easily access their services and offerings most of the time. But a sudden disruption may cause business failure. For business owners, the definition of downtime has been often something more than the “system not accessible”, it also involves two other scenarios:

·         A) They can access the system, but some functions are not operational

            B)The system is accessible, but the performance is very low

If you are willing to estimate the true cost of your web downtime, then here are some important variables that you can consider while calculating your entire cost:

Business sales impact:

If you want to figure out how much a span of downtime costs in terms of sales, then the first thing that you should determine is the average profit per minute. You can then easily calculate that profit per minute with the downtime to determine the total lost sales. This will also vary with the time during which the down time occurred. Afternoon sessions will cost you more as that is the time when people mostly visit websites. In the morning, around 2 a.m. web traffic is typically lighter. Keeping a track of your website performance through 24X7 monitoring service will help to reduce such negative sales impact.

Damage of business reputation: 

Your non availability can create a big scar on your business reputation, which will lead to losing the trust and loyalty of your customers. Most business owners usually invest a good amount of money and also time to build the brand name. all your efforts will be a waste if you experience downtime even just for an hour. While calculating the exact cost of your site’s downtime, it is vital to keep in mind the resources that you have to utilize to repair the tainted brand image.

Waste of marketing campaigns:

Another important factor that you should consider is the money invested in your marketing efforts like PPC campaigns. Try to calculate the amount of money that is spent on marketing when your site has experienced the downtime.  You won’t reap any benefits from your marketing campaign as your site was inaccessible when your prospects clicked on the PPC link or any advertisement.

Can downtime have a negative impact on your search rankings?

Though the reason for website downtime is not very specific always, but the common factors that may cause it include planned downtime, malicious attacks, natural disasters or any failure of components. Leaving aside the immediate impact of downtime on your business, it doesn’t mean that your search rankings will not be affected. This is because Google recently changed the way the bots crawl your site. Earlier, it used to crawl the site once a month and if your website was down temporarily, then the search rankings wouldn’t take a heavy knock. But now Google bots frequently visit the websites and if your site experiences a downtime for a long period without proper measures, then your search engine rankings will surely take a hit.

Downtime can be really frustrating and stress-provoking and it is imperative to manage the impact of downtime before it happens. A 24X7 webmonitoring service will be able to track the performance of your website and take essential steps during any issues before it starts to affect your business.