IT Services Check: When Websites Go Down – Are You Prepared?
When Go Daddy went down a few years ago, millions of websites being hosted by the company went down with it. Small to medium sized businesses suffered a complete shutdown of daily operations, revenue loss and opportunities for new customers. This raises the question, as a business owner, how prepared are you should your website go down? Website management is a form of IT services that has its own protocols and preventative maintenance. It is important that your business is ready to deal
Here are some numbers to help you understand how much your business could suffer as a result of your website going down:
- 9% – the percentage of existing customers who will permanently abandon your site due to even just a day of outage
- 28% – the percentage of existing customers who will seek business elsewhere if your site is unacceptably lagging and slow
- It only takes 17 minutes of service interruption before a customer gives up and starts thinking of moving their business elsewhere
- When Apple’s App Store went down for 11 hours in 40 countries the resulting revenue loss amounted to $34 million
IT services experts confirm that when your website serves as a key driver for customer interaction, revenue and to some extent, an integral part of internal daily operations, having a proper business continuity protocol in place in the event that an outage happens is important. Ensure, through working closely with your IT services provider that your online presence does not go completely dark. How is this done? There are a few contingency plans you can put in place to make sure your business does not suffer due to a website outage.
- Create a status page for when your website goes under
- Ensure that your IT services provider knows that the status page should be hosted on a different provider
- Open and monitor other communication channels such as Facebook and Twitter so you can post constant updates
- Keep yourself updated regarding your website’s status by keeping the line of communication with your IT services provider open
CMS Information Technology understands the importance of having a strong and consistent online presence. Our goal is to help you keep your business continuity going even during events of website outages to ensure that loss of revenue is kept to a bare minimum.
