Is Amazon Ready for Prime Day? Why Both Big and Little Guys Need Website Monitoring Service

Amazon’s famous Prime Day, which boasts deals that equal or surpass those found on Black Friday, is coming mid-month. Sources are saying deals will start July 16th and run through July 17th this year. In years past, customers have had frustration with slow-loading pages, while other pages did not load at all. Not only does this cause Amazon to lose sales on one of its biggest days of the year, but it causes serious frustration for customers in an “I want it now” mindset who feel that they are missing out on a limited-time deal. This is especially true on Prime Day because the deals offered are sometimes limited in quantity or only remain valid for a set hour of the day. If you can’t get the site to work during the deal period or before it sells out, you’ve lost out on a deal you may have really wanted. No one wants to upset customers needlessly. One would think Amazon has website downtime monitoring in its arsenal of tools, and it does in a way, but not in a way that helps Amazon.

Amazon’s Website Monitoring Service

It’s no secret that AWS hosted websites and cloud services are becoming more and more popular. Unfortunately, very little is offered in the way of services from Amazon so that customers can monitor the uptime and performance of their sites and receive alerts when downtime issues occur. Furthermore, the limited monitoring services that are offered are also based on the AWS platform, so if AWS is down, so is your website monitoring service.

Some people may assume that Amazon staff is on top of the site 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Why, then, would they even need website monitoring service? Because a quality website monitoring service could literally save the company from millions of dollars in lost profits. For sites that are hosted with AWS, you may not realize that all your website’s server centers are located in Virginia just a few miles from each other. If a widespread power outage occurs or the server sites succumb to a natural disaster, then not only will your site go down but so will the service that is supposed to be monitoring that site for you. There is no way to know how long it would take you to become aware of downtime problem.

Why Even the Giants Need Website Monitoring Service

How often have you been on the phone with a big company and heard a representative say, “Our system is moving slow.” Or perhaps, “We are having problems with the system right now, but it should be back up later.” These are not very encouraging statements and they often leave customers confused and frustrated. And who knows if the information about the performance issues has been passed on to the right personnel? The bigger a company is, the harder it can be for the left hand to know what the right hand is doing. Sometimes even giant websites like Amazon need help, and when it comes to website downtime monitoring, itis definitely one of the things they need help with.

It’s Not Just Amazon

Amazon isn’t the only ecommerce giant that loses money due to unnecessary downtime. Many of the big online presences face downtime at various points throughout the year. So exactly how big is this problem? When you consider the average cost per hour for a large organization can range from $500,000 to $1 million per hour, it becomes readily apparent that downtime is a very, very big problem for even the biggest names on the Internet. In fact, a simple typo cost Amazon $150 million last year. That typo caused Amazon’s S3 system to go down for three hours and then it took an additional 4 hours before it was operating as it should. One typo. $150 million. If it can happen to Amazon, it can happen to anyone.

Get Ready for Prime Day (and Get Your Website Ready for Maximized Uptime)

Amazon is going to get hit with some pretty massive traffic on Prime Day. Let’s hope that the site remains issue-free for all the shoppers looking forward to the deals. In the meantime, consider the uptime of your own website. If you haven’t already partnered with a website uptime monitoring service, now is the time to take that step. While you may not lose $150 million in a single day due to downtime, any profit loss can be detrimental to an online business, sometimes even meaning the difference between failure and success.