Is your uptime letting you down?

If you’ve ever investigated cloud computing products, then you’ll no doubt have come across the concept of “uptime.” It’s a word that many providers throw around a lot, but it’s a simple concept: it’s how much of the time you can expect your services to be available to users.

For technical reasons, 100 percent uptime usually isn’t feasible. But many web hosts offer 99.9 percent uptime or higher, depending on their technology. High uptime rates are important for reasons we’ll discuss below. But suffice to say, if your uptime is lacking you could end up losing customers – and that’s bad for business.

Many businesses leaders are surprised to learn that many of the services that they rely on daily are not available all of the time. Even some of the biggest services on the internet have short-duration downtime for things like server restarts of updates. Most of the time, server unavailability is manageable: it’s when downtime appears to strike at random that the real problem can begin.

Take a look at some of the reasons your uptime could be letting you down.

You lose revenue

If you’re a business, you rely on your servers being up and running all the time, day and night, to facilitate revenue generation. When servers go offline, customers can’t find out the information they need about your product, and your income stream can suffer.

As hosting.co.uk/dedicated-servers/ points out, you can now get dedicated servers that adjust to the needs of your business. You don’t have to provide your own servers or monitor them: a third party can now do that. Server hosts often offer much better uptime than you could achieve in-house, protecting your revenue streams from unwanted interruptions.

You waste time

When servers go down, there can be profound knock-on effects. Customers that can’t get hold of you through your website will often pick up the phone to get in touch, increasing the workload on your call staff. Half-finished orders can create an administrative nightmare. Customers may think that they bought the products in their basket when, in fact, they did not complete the transaction.

Uptime, therefore, is essential for preventing disgruntled customers from clogging up your customer service channels says medium.com. When your servers work as intended, your reputation improves.

Your SEO declines

Google and other search engines track server uptime. They do this because they want to find out whether you are able to offer customers a consistent and high-quality service. If they detect that your servers are struggling to meet customer requests, then they could take this as an indication that you are not providing their users with a quality experience, and punish you as a result.

You lose customer loyalty

The speed of your website shouldn’t say anything about the quality of your product. But to customers interested in their overall experience of your company, it can make a big difference. So if your uptime is poor, it can put them off. Being reachable is essential for many companies, meaning that uptime is a priority.