Your business website can crash at any time for more than a thousand reasons unless your website is prepared. Many popular websites crash. Here is a list of sites that didn't prepare for an outage.
This website (at the time of writing, 2008) receives hundreds of thousands of visitors each day. If websites with deep pockets can fail, then what can happen to your own business website?
Shoe Money has a Timeout Error — Popular affiliate marketing blog down for two days on and off. Network timeouts are usually caused by a hosting failure, in this case it took down other money making websites.- Navisite Suffers Massive Failure, 1,000s of Sites Down — A publicly traded company hosting company loses access during a data center consolidation. Down for three days. How long would you be down if this happened to you?
- Salesforce.com Suffers Outage — Popular CRM system down, locking customers out of their own data. This is a complex environment with multiple clusters of servers, yet it still had a major outage.
- Google Has Isolated Server Errors — While these errors rarely happen and are quickly recovered from, even Google has isolated server errors. So, you can too.
Don't be caught unprepared. There are several other outages I've been called to service that I can't list here due to contractual obligations. Just understand, outages happen when you are least prepared.
Always have a plan and a backup system to bring your site back online. While these failures do happen, today, there are no excuses for multiple-day failures. If that's how you make money, then don't you think it's worth protecting.
Most recently Parlor, a popular video sharing site, crashes when their vendor Amazon Web Services shutdown hosting. Not all website failures are technical, all kinds of conflicts can crash your online-only business.
The good news is that the right design can protect you by making your website available to visitors. It takes both a technical and a risk management perspective. Contact our offices to ask about an uptime analysis for your business website.
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