Website under construction’, ‘404 error’, ‘500 internal server error’. It is likely that at some point you have encountered one of these errors during your Internet browsing.
When this happens the user gets disappointed and leaves the page. If it’s a regular customer and it’s something that doesn’t usually happen, he’ ll come back another time. But if he is a new user he will almost certainly not return.
This is just one of the many consequences of downtime. So IT departments have a big challenge to overcome, especially in these days when the race to get customers is increasingly aggressive, and to win companies must always offer the best service to users. To achieve this, the uptime indicator is essential.
What is the uptime indicator?
Proper IT management is essential to improve business performance, especially for those who focus on the online world. In order to do this, the IT department must concentrate on several indicators and metrics. The uptime indicator is one of the main ones since it is the one that measures the percentage of time that the website is available.
The uptime is basically the time that a computer, server, system, or hardware works without interruptions. The opposite term would then be ‘downtime’, which is when the system is not operational. If a web page is not available, it is as if it does not exist. Therefore, uptime is considered the most important metric in the Internet universe.
However, you must know that having an uptime of 100% is impossible. In fact, no hosting company guarantees this totality, not even large providers such as Google or Amazon. The maximum you will find is an uptime of 99.99%.
The uptime indicator can be affected by different factors. Natural disasters such as storms, earthquakes, and fires, among others, can interrupt the communication between the data center and your website, causing downtime. But it can also occur due to malicious attacks, system failures, server updates, or maintenance, among others.
Depending on the type of incident, downtime can be classified in two ways: mild and severe. The first one occurs when the website works but with errors; different problems can arise when navigating, such as image loading errors, slow loading time, or unavailable sections. The second one occurs when the page is completely out of service, so an error will appear when trying to access it.
Why is Uptime Indicator essential for your IT department?
Do you know when your website goes offline? The uptime indicator is the one that will tell your IT department what percentage of time your page is online. And thanks to the monitoring of this activity time, you will be informed immediately when your site has technical difficulties so that you can solve them as soon as possible.
Have you ever wondered what would happen if your websites have constant bugs? The consequences of this would be negative for your business. So if you’re not yet monitoring this metric, we’ll tell you the reasons why you should start now.
Protecting your business image
If by monitoring the uptime indicator of your pages you find an important time of failure, the reputation of your business may be in danger. Keep in mind that the image of a brand depends largely on the level of customer satisfaction and if your business spends a lot of time offline, it will not be well perceived.
Keeping your customers happy
Once again, customers are the ones who support your business. And if they’re not happy, you won’t be able to grow in the sector. Your website needs to have a good uptime to guarantee your users the best service. Also, if you have a problem with inactivity and this is not resolved for a long period, it is likely that your customers will choose your competitors.
Avoid losing customers
Everything’s connected. If when monitoring the uptime indicator, you notice an important time offline, you could be losing sales or the possibility of gaining customers. Frequent downtime will make people look for other companies that are available to meet their needs.
In 2013, Amazon was idle for less than 2 hours. This offline time generated a potential loss of up to $4.72 million.
Get a good web positioning
Good positioning in search engines will help you to improve the reach of your content and therefore the sales of your business. Google (the main search engine) does not appreciate websites that are not available.
Therefore, if your page presents constant problems of activity, Google will penalize you by lowering your position in the list of search results. For this reason, it is essential to pay attention to the uptime indicator.
Detect cyber-attacks faster
Malicious attacks are one of the reasons for the downtime of your website.
By monitoring your websites your IT department will not only be able to know the online time of your website, but also the possible piracy attempts that could lead to an interruption of the activity of your page.
Freshping, the best option to access an Uptime Indicator
The availability of websites is key to the success of any business that is betting on the online environment. But even if hosting providers offer 99.99% uptime, how can you ensure that this is true? With Freshping you can do it.
This is a free application that keeps track of the performance and availability of your web pages. Thanks to this you will be able to improve your response time to solve any interruption caused by the inactivity of your website.
The function of Freshping is to detect performance problems that may present your web pages, as well as the hosting services where they are hosted. If for any reason during the analysis, some latency greater than 1 minute occurs, an alert will be activated and a notification will be sent to you by the means you have chosen to notify you about the inactivity.
Freshping is a very useful tool that also stands out for:
- Allowing the monitoring of up to 50 web pages for free.
- Sending instant notifications.
- Allowing integrations with different applications.
- Keeping users informed about the status of your web services.
- Setting up a multi-user login (up to 30 administrators).
The uptime indicator is an essential metric in your IT department, so you should have tools such as Freshping for monitoring. If you are interested in working with this customizable and scalable software, GB Advisors can help you. Our agents are available to give you all the information you need. Do not hesitate to contact us.
