Uptime is one of the most important factors to consider when it comes to the choice of a hosting provider. Your website only works and can be visited only if its server is up and running. If your website isn’t working when visitors want to check it, then theywould leave, and in most cases, they won’t come back. If Google sees that your site is unavailable, it ranks it poorly. You lose traffic, you lose website visitors - your potential customers, and your business suffers. It is bad publicity no matter whether it is a small business website or a big corporation site.
Uptime is an indicator if a hosting provider is reliable. There are various services and tools that can help to make a choice where you can compare the uptime of many of hosting providers before choosing one for your website.
How Is Uptime Measured
Uptime of a hosting server is measured in percentages. In an ideal world uptime is 100% but in reality, this rarely happens. Consider the fact that even though a server’s uptime is 99%, it means it is unavailable 7.2 hours a month, and this is a lot for any business.
Why Hostings Are Down
Hosting servers consist of many elements: operating systems, databases, network connections, servers hardware, and many more. Even though the technology develops and hostings upgrade their servers, they break sometimes. Software failures also happen. If a hosting has skillful personnel fixing problems then this provider is more reliable. When you choose a hosting provider consider those that have newer servers, and better statistics troubleshooting various software issues. They will also be the ones that have better uptime statistics.
Why Uptime Is Important for Business
If your website is down often, then it is bad for SEO ranking. Google tracks websites, and if yours is often offline, you will get penalized. In other words, Google won’t rank your website well, and people will not find you via search engines. A website that runs smoothly and is up all the time gets a better ranking from search engines and, thus, more traffic.
If you run a business then most likely you have a website to sell something or to promote your services. If your website is down, clients cannot buy your products or your services. If a potential client comes to the website and it’s down then most likely you will not see this person again. Besides, you are not able to advertise and promote your site. As a result, you lose revenue. This is especially important for e-commerce businesses who generate 100% of income from online sales. As you see, hosting server uptime is crucial for your business.
If your website is down you waste your time trying to figure out how to fix the problem with the server. You also waste your customers’ time who try to access your site a few times. There is also wasted time when you try to track down orders that were not finished or solve other issues with clients. If your website runs continuously, it saves you from all these troubles.
When you consistently provide uninterrupted services, you get loyal clients who will come back to you. Considering very high competition in virtually every sphere of business and services nowadays, being available to your clients 24/7 is crucial. If your website if down than most clients will not wait for it to start working: they will turn to your competitors. You cannot afford to ruin the trust between your brand and your clients that you worked so hard to built. Therefore, your website must be up as consistently as possible.
Narendra is a freelancer blogger and passionate writer..