In today's technology environment, the success or failure of any business mostly depends on consumers experience on the online websites or applications. There are many factors that influence the consumers impression on a particular brand. When they take the big decision to abandon a known brand for its competitor, it could be because they might have had bad digital experience while working with your website. Users come with varied expectations and the way they interact with the website is also different.
Downtime can be frustrating for customers if they are unable to access website of an online business. One of the reasons for denial of access could be insufficient hosting resources where the servers or entire network stop functioning due to overwhelming requests from the users. For instance, during holiday season, some e-commerce websites experience sudden surge in traffic and become unavailable to the users until the problem gets resolved.
For a business that depends on its website to generate revenues, maintaining uptime during holiday season is critical. This is the most profitable time for ecommerce businesses as they will be generating higher revenues through online sales. It is important for these websites to make sure customers can get access to their offerings without any disruption, particularly between Thanksgiving and Christmas days when more sales are expected to happen. Business owners aspire to keep their websites live without any unplanned downtime in this period.
When companies rely on websites for their business, then downtime is not acceptable. Needless to say, every time websites go down or do not perform well with issues, businesses lose their traffic and revenues. When it comes to measuring website uptime, web hosts merely consider the time your site is being alive on the web, but ignore performance issues. The uptime measurements from site owner's point of view is quite different because for them uptime measure also includes site response issues, slow page loads and part of the site not working properly.
These days, businesses, irrespective of their type or size, are using cloud services to simplify their resource management and reduce operational expenses. Cloud is not the replacement for hosting but offers broad collection of services under three categories IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service). While some businesses use cloud for hosting purpose, others deploy website applications in cloud for their end users need.
One of the secrets behind any successful online business is a healthy and effective website. To remain competitive in the market, it is important to make sure the site is continuously available to the customers without any breakdowns. For instance, if a brick-and-mortar store is closed for one hour, the business may likely lose customers from a localized geographical areas. However, for online businesses the impact will be entirely different. The one hour website disruption will have different implication as it will be affecting customers across the entire country or world.
Fighting against downtime issues is not new for businesses with online websites. Achieving zero downtime because is very tough because it requires to keep the site up through out the year continuously without a single interruption. Typically, websites go through disruptions for couple of hours when hosting provider schedules for regular maintenance. These planned downtimes are somewhat manageable as the business owners will have the opportunity to take precautionary measures and schedule it during off-peak hours.
The brick-and-mortar retailers can sell their products only when the store is open for the customers. Similar is the case with e-commerce retailers. There is a possibility of business happening only when their websites are accessible to the users. An e-commerce business which is open to world-wide customers can go to zero accessibility in a matter of seconds. This is similar to shutting down a brick-and-mortar retailer store without notice causing inconvenience to the shoppers.
Over the past few years, we have seen businesses adopting many different ways to boost their online visibility through websites. The online retailing sales as a percentage of total retail sales worldwide, has increased from 2.5% in June 2005 to 8.6% in 2016, and estimated to grow to 12.8% by 2019. Today online retail purchases account for more than $1 trillion in value. In fact traditional retail businesses are losing their market share as many customers are preferring to make purchases through online websites.
Ever since Google has considered page load time as one of the search engine ranking factor, websites started using CDNs to speed up their sites and improve performance. Typically, content delivery network (CDN) stores the cached version of static website content (such as JavaScript, CSS, images) in edge servers located in various geographical places. The intention is to serve end users from the nearest possible servers. Today, over half of the top 10K websites are already being served by CDNs and the usage is increasing rapidly every year.
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