What You Need to Know About Server Uptime Monitoring and End-User Satisfaction

When it comes to ensuring success online, most website owners would agree that zero downtime is the ultimate goal. Unfortunately, zero downtime, as in no downtime whatsoever, is a goal that can never be achieved. There are measures you can take to minimize downtime, but completely eliminating downtime is out of the question. While this isn’t the ideal answer that many hope for, it is a fact of life in a world of software and hardware errors, third-party failures, and maintenance issues, among other factors. Savvy website owners have discovered that server uptime monitoring can have a positive impact on server uptime. These website owners are working hard to partner with quality server monitoring services to ensure that end-user satisfaction is maximized along with a website’s uptime and bottom line. If you want to know how uptime monitoring service can impact your site’s end users and how you can ensure higher end-user satisfaction, we have some advice.

Understanding Uptime and Downtime

There are many who mistakenly assume that downtime only occurs when your site is completely unavailable to the end user. The fact of the matter is that uptime doesn’t just refer to a site that is online. Uptime only occurs when a web service, host, or website is available without any break in performance or availability. This means if your site can be viewed, but isn’t functioning properly, your experiencing a bout of downtime, even though some of your site is up and available. When you add in times of poor performance or failing third-party services, your site’s uptime statistics can change drastically, and not for the better.

Why Do End-Users Care About Uptime?

When it comes to online business, competition is often fierce, and consumers aren’t always loyal to a specific brand. Time is valuable, and a loss of time means a loss of money. Statistics show that, on average, for each minute a website is down, $5,600 is lost. However, the bottom line isn’t the only thing impacted by website downtime. Downtime also affects end-user satisfaction. Many visitors will never return to a site if they have a negative experience caused by downtime. That means end-user satisfaction decreases as downtime increases, and those are customers you may never get back.

Downtime that affects a business’s website as well as its internal operations are even worse. If a visitor contacts your company to try to do business when your site is experiencing downtime, if employees have also lost access to the Internet, those employees can’t access customer accounts or place orders for those customers who have been on hold. This results in long wait times for those consumers and a more-than-frustrating experience when, after a long wait time, the customer gets through only to be informed that customer service is unable to help them. This, in turn, damages your business relationships and damages them irreparably in some cases.

Your Employees Are Affected by Downtime Too

Studies have also found that downtime has a significant impact on company employees. A recent study shows that the average employee takes more than 20 minutes to re-engage after a bout of downtime. Furthermore, extended bouts of downtime can result in a 20 percent decline in employee cognitive function. In consideration of these facts, it is important to understand that quality server uptime monitoring helps with more than just being promptly notified when your site does hit a bout of downtime. Quality server uptime monitoring can also increase employee productivity and end-user satisfaction as it allows you to address downtime issues immediately and put failsafe plans into place right away rather than waiting until you happen to notice a server is having an issue. Furthermore, uptime monitoring can help you protect your brand’s image and reputation in addition to improving your business’s employee productivity.

Minimizing Server Downtime

In order to minimize server downtime, you need to rely on a quality server uptime monitoring service. IT professionals calculate downtime by the time a server is available. For example, annually there are 8,760 hours available (24 hours per day multiplied by 365 days a year). If your website experienced a total of five hours of downtime in a single year, the uptime percentage would still be .9994 percent uptime. That may seem like a great uptime ratio on the surface, but when you consider that the average minute of downtime costs $5,600, that’s a loss of $1,680,000 from your bottom line each year. Considering this, you can’t simply rely on uptime percentages provided by your website’s statistics or your hosting provider’s reports. You need to take every precaution that you can to work toward minimizing that downtime and the resulting profit loss and end-user dissatisfaction that are caused by it.

Minimizing Downtime Means Preparing for Downtime

A partnership with a server uptime monitoring provider helps you prepare for downtime. It allows you to identify when a site is down or performing poorly the exact moment the issue presents itself. Such a partnership also ensures that you are able to communicate your site’s issues rapidly in response to downtime. At the end of the day, a server uptime monitoring provider will ensure that you are proactive in terms of handling downtime and the partnership can help you quickly and accurately respond to any downtime that does occur, thereby ensuring that end-user satisfaction and brand loyalty are not compromised and that you profits are maximized.