Can your Web site or servers afford downtime? - Domenic Macchione

Industry estimates indicate that Internet businesses can loose on average about $15,000 for every hour of downtime. This figure combines the cost of repairs with the cost of lost opportunities and sales. For an Internet-enabled business, downtime can mean devastating losses in revenue and credibility. For what ever reason, organizations have accepted these losses, regardless of expense, as an unavoidable cost of doing business on the Internet. Most web hosting provider don’t really care about uptime at all. They throw the 99.9% number but don’t do anything if they don’t meet that objective. Did you know that 99.9% means about 7 hours of downtime a month. Image having your website take a day off once a month. If they go beyond 8 hours does a hosting company offer you nothing in return?? Most do not!!
Even more scary are companies that keep their Internet operations in-house, primarily due to a lack of knowledge about available options. They believe they can manage that infrastructure better by doing it themselves. They do not consider power redundancy, Internet feed capacity, server loads, security, and the list goes on. The cost to operate your own web server and maintain it over 5 years can cost well over $25,000 a Year.

The Outsourcing Option:

By outsourcing responsibility for Internet infrastructure to the right service provider, a company gains access to state-of-the-art, highly redundant systems that ensure reliability and free up internal staff to focus their efforts on building and managing Web site content and applications. Today outsourcing your servers to companies can cost as little as a hundred and so dollars a month. Website hosting ranges from free to cheap to fair priced web hosting firms who charge about $25 per website per month but offer guarantees and focus on business needs. Try to always ask your new hosting provider for a copy of the service level agreement. Try to find one one that offer 100% uptime and will provide you a discount the moment that is not meant. If you can do this you will get a greater return on investment.

About the Author

Domenic is co-founder of Rebel Networks. Rebel Networks is a leading provider of outsourced Internet infrastructure and related managed web solutions. Rebel Networks services include the provision of managed dedicated servers, unmanaged collocation services, domain names services, & shared web hosting solutions. All backed by a 100% SLA visit www.rebelnetworks.com