Technorati provides an excellent example of keeping most of your site up during a website outage. Of course, by the time I started writing this article, the whole website was having issues. But here's the lesson.

Editor's Note: Technorati is one of many now dead search engine and advertising platforms. Launched in November 2002, it was a blog-based search engine that most call social media today. In 2008 it was one of the largest ad networks reaching 100 million unique visitors a year. Technorati doesn't exist in 2021. — Samantha

Design your web application to have a separate delivery of the front end and application backend. For maximum reliability, these two layers float over a database system.

If your delivery engine goes down, then your application servers can still function. If your database goes down, then you have a fail-over system to continue to deliver content. This design is called tiered segmentation.

Does a low-traffic website need redundant databases on the back end? Not necessarily. Today even a low-cost shared hosting platform provides redundant database servers.

Go beyond content delivery networks. Your website needs to be more than a single-engine if you are expecting any volume of traffic. When doing business online, your website is your storefront.

From my observation, Technorati has segmented systems until you log on as of 2008. After you log on, the user is connected to both front-end and backend systems. The poor design creates uptime risks.

The benefits of a tiered system include optimizing front-end traffic delivery, upgrading application servers in tiers independent of the front end, and greater redundancy.

How does your website handle an application failure? Can you still prove some functionality with your database down? How to reduce or eliminate Website outages? Remember, if your visitor can't get to your site, you are losing money.

As a copywriter or marketer, you may not manage the technical side of websites. Website outages still matter. Your content doesn't show if the website is down, so this topic matters to you too.

Technorati's role was to connect publishers with advertisers.  They built on the back of a blogging craze from 2006 to 2009 but lost market primarily on the stability of their content management system.

Name squeeze pages don't collect leads when they don't load. This concern about website outages extends to marketing automation systems as well. You have a vested interest in uptime, be sure to ask about it when working with clients.

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