Technology is wonderful, but also the complexity of it all can sometimes spell trouble if we aren’t prepared. One of a business’s most important marketing assets is their website. On the one hand it is a platform for their customers to gather information and connect with the business, and on the other it’s a way for the business to generate leads and interest about their product and service.
Are you adequately protecting your website to ensure that it’s resilient in case of a technology failure?
Millions of servers all around the globe are actively “serving up” websites for a viewer to see when they request it. When someone clicks a link to get to your website, they expect it to be up when they get there. You have milliseconds to capture attention and convert that visitor into a lead. What if the website loads terribly slow, or even worse doesn’t load at all?
100% uptime is impossible, at least usually, so a little bit of downtime is to be expected, hopefully your website provider is shooting for the five nines, 99.999% uptime, but that is in a perfect world. Here are a few things to consider about your website and what to do about it.
Find out what your providers SLA is
What is the Service Level Agreement between you and your website provider, whether it’s a consulting firm that hosts your website, or a full blow online application such as HubSpot?
Don’t be afraid to ask, hey what is the expected uptime and what are the backup procedures for my website/application?
It isn’t reasonable to expect 100% perfection from a web host, but it is certainly reasonable to expect a best effort and a plan of action when an outage occurs.
Backup your website and assets
My mom said to me once when I was younger, sometimes to get it done right you need to do it yourself. We pay for and expect good service from technology providers, but sometimes you have to do a little extra effort on your part, to be self-sufficient, or in business speak, have a business continuity plan. We can’t always expect things to go completely well in a problematic situation.
So, what do you do? Just take a periodic snapshot of your website. If you are technical, know how to do it, and have the resources and access to your web server, take a backup there and archive it somewhere. If you would rather, do it in a ‘non-technical’ manner, more simply, you can use a web crawler or spider like tool, which can go through a website, download pages, pictures, and other objects it finds they can be viewed locally, without needing to be connected to the Internet.
Two such tools that do this for free are HTTrack Website Copier and WebReaper. They both work similarly but take your pick. I use HTTrack more frequently.
There are many more advanced tools out there, but these are a couple of the easiest to use and the price is right.
Monitor your website uptime
Your website host should be able to provide logs and information or a dashboard showing uptime, status and if issues come up, but wouldn’t you proactively like to know if your website has just gone down 5 minutes before you are going to be getting on stage to present a new area of your website at a tradeshow? Yea, that’s what I thought.
In walks, Pingdom, the website monitoring tool. They have packages that range from free to enterprise level. I’ve used them in both situations, for monitoring a single website on the free edition to the enterprise level monitoring many websites, applications and services.
Check with your website provider to ensure they won’t be irked if you have the Pingdom “bots” probing their servers every 5 minutes or so, but usually it isn’t a problem, especially if your website host isn’t shady.
Remember you get what you pay for
If you sign up with the $2 a month introductory package offer for your business website, you get what you pay for. While it may be nice getting a bargain, is it really worth it if your website is only up 75% of the time? Look for a web host and provider that has a scalable redundant infrastructure that doesn’t host their servers on low grade equipment.