Keep Uptime On The Up & Up
A website can’t do much good when it’s offline, which is precisely why it is important to learn about uptime and take precautionary measures.
No longer are shop hours only from 9 to 5. Through the evolution of the internet, faster connection speeds and easy to create and maintain websites, a major portion of the Earth conducts business online. Customers of every age, race and location can access websites from around the globe ensuring that our “doors” are open around the clock, that is as long as your website is online…
In the ecommerce world, downtime is the enemy: it is the monster that hides under our bed and in our closets. Once downtime happens, everything stops. Downtime can occur for a multitude of reasons but most can be prevented through a little research and preparedness.
Downtime can affect your entire business in one fell swoop, from revenue loss to missing leads and potential clients. It is crucial to your brand that you maintain the highest uptime possible and that’s where Midphase can help.
Below are a few of the reasons that downtime can occur and what you can do about them.
Renewal dates:
It’s easy to remember to pay the bills that come every single month, but those yearly, bi-yearly or even only every three years are hard to keep up with. Time never seems to pass so quickly than when your domain renewal is due, but if you forget to renew your domain or hosting package the results can be devastating.
Solution: Let Midphase remember to pay your renewals for you. By signing up for autopay we can deduct the money without reminders or hassle. Just be sure that your payment information is up to date within your CHI account and we will take care of the rest.
Malicious activity:
In a perfect world we would all live peacefully online together as one big happy webizen community, but unfortunately that is not our reality. Every site is at risk from hackers, spammers and DDoS attacks. These attacks can compromise sensitive information, create downtime and wreak havoc on your brand.
Solution: First of all, a heavy duty password can work wonders for security. By partnering with SiteLock, you can be sure that your site and your customers are protected.
Traffic spikes:
As your business grows, so will traffic to your website. This is a great thing! That is unless your site is getting bogged down in all of the attention. In order to keep all of the extra attention you’ve been generating a solution must be found.
Solution: If you are running your site from a shared server you might have outgrown your capacity. Dedicated or SSD VPS hosting are great alternatives to shared and will ensure that you have dedicated bandwidth just for your business. Also, by partnering up with CloudFlare your site can run faster and safer with additional redundancy. Oh and by the way, it’s completely free within your CHI account.
Copyright infringement:
While this seems like an easy topic to avoid copyright infringement is actually much more common than you would think. Any unauthorized publishing of content that is copyrighted by someone else can leave your site vulnerable and subject to downtime. Any video, image or text that is taken from another site puts your site at risk and believe us, it’s not worth the hassle.
Solution: Learn the rules of copyright infringement, give credit when credit is due and avoid copy and paste at all cost.
Maintenance:
In order to keep servers up and running a certain amount of maintenance is required. As your web host we will provide you with ample warning and do our best to perform maintenance at the most convenient time available to us.
Solution: Plan ahead and follow your hosting provider on all forms of access: Twitter, Facebook, status pages and so on to be prepared yourself and to warn your customers of upcoming downtime.
Server outage:
Every hosting company faces some downtime whether it be a power outage or natural disaster, a certain feature of life on earth making connectivity difficult. How much downtime you face is up to the client. By choosing a company with N+1 redundancy, an amazing infrastructure and data centers in geographic locations not prone to disaster can greatly increase your uptime percentages.
Solution: Host with Midphase where our Service Level Agreement guarantees uptime or your money back. Our N+1, Tier 4 data center offers redundancy to keep you online with backup generators and superior infrastructure keep your site online.