I am surprised to hear from my clients, partners and colleagues that, quite often, website owners just don’t really care whether their sites are having problems or not.
One said to me with ease, “Well, my business site has been down for 2 days and let’s just see where it goes.” If I were him, I would be in a panic mode and will try everything in my power to get my business site to go back up again. Until that happens, I will be anxiously waiting. Why? Because to me, my business websites’ uptime is very, very important.
Consider this: What if your brick-and-mortar retail store is being closed for two days? You’ll lose more than just those two days-worth of revenue; you could have your potential customers to flee to your competitor’s retail store; your customers could think that you are not dependable; you could make the headline on the local newspaper – not a pretty picture.
To me, a business website is as important as any off-line business presence. Recovering from the lost traffic and tarnished reputation is resource-intensive.
Just like the off-line counterparts, the bigger and more authoritative your business website, the more severe is the impact of downtime. Just ask Reddit and Sony PlayStation Network about the impact of downtime – I’m sure they will say it’s devastating and to recover from it is resource-intensive.
How to avoid business website downtime
Website downtime is inevitable. No matter how dependable your business website’s web hosting provider, you should expect downtime to happen; therefore, no web hosting provider can guarantee 100% uptime – most can guarantee 99.9% uptime, and that means nearly 9 hours of downtime a year.
The question is, are you ready to handle those 9 hours/year downtime? How do you know when that happens? Please also bear in mind that if you run 1 business website, things are not as complicated as if you run 300 business websites.
The bottom line is, you need a tool that can help you monitor your website uptime and let you know when something is happening on one of your websites.
How to monitor your business website performance
There are plenty of web-based tools to help you just that. Many – if not most – website performance monitoring tools are free to use for limited capabilities – usually limited to uptime monitoring for a small number of sites. To monitor more websites, you need to subscribe for a reasonable amount of monthly subscription fee.
If you are looking for free tools that can help you monitor hundreds even thousands of business websites, one of the better options you should consider is HostUcan’s Free Uptime Performance Monitor.
The website performance tool help you monitor your business websites’ uptime and will send you notifications should something goes wrong and performance reports on regular basis. The great thing is, you can have unlimited number of business websites to monitor.
There is a catch though; to signup for the free service, you need to submit a web hosting review on your web host providers, and get your “reward” (choose 6 months Server Uptime monitoring.) The monitoring service should be renewed every 6 months; renewals are easy – you only need to submit a new web hosting review. It’s simple and a valuable trade-off for business website owners.
Please note, the tool won’t stop downtime to happen. What the tool can do is to let you know as soon as your business websites experience downtime, so you can do all the necessary actions to get your sites back on track as soon as possible.
I recommend you to give the tool a try. Just go to HostUcan Website Uptime and Performance Monitoring to learn more about the free service and the signup process.
Ivan Widjaya
Managing business website performance