How much website downtime is acceptable?
There are two ways to answer this question — The right answer and the logical answer. The right answer is obviously no downtime, but is it viable?
This is not a possibility.
There can be absolutely no way a site can have a consistent 100% up-time.
Though sites can strive to completely eliminate unplanned downtimes, there will be those unavoidable circumstances where your site has to go for maintenance or upgrades during which your customers have to face the infamous 404 page.
Even the best sites in the world face down times
Their horror stories are going to be constantly etched in the minds of these big players.
- Amazon, the mother-ship of all sites had some really embarrassing situations when their site Amazon.com and their AWS services both experienced significant downtime, as a result of which many sites that were under the Amazon cloud took a hit as well.
- Last year, Yahoo faced over four days of downtime when no user was able to access any mails on Yahoo, that forced the CEO Marissa Mayer to issue an apology to the customers.
The Infamous Google Story
Everybody knows the famous Google story when Google.com faced a downtime of 10 minutes in 2012.
The entire internet went into a frenzy, people started doing mad calculations and making assumptions before Google reinstated services and people became regular humans again.
Google’s losses due to those 10 minutes of downtime was calculated to be roughly $725,000 (exclusive of taxes).
E-Commerce — Poor Guys!
E-Commerce sites are the ones most affected during downtimes and outages
EMC.com did a study on eCommerce companies and the results of the study are quite alarming.
66% of respondents say that there would be a substantial or at least a sizable loss in customers as a result of a website shutting down.”
The above graph shows that if customers get frustrated while making a purchase, they will abandon the purchase and never return and such losses extrapolated, amount to over $3.4 million.
Why Is My Site Having Downtime?
There are various reasons why your site could be having a downtime.
- A programming error
- Data center issues
- Server overload or server crashes
- Sites that have been compromised
- Planned maintenance
- DNS Errors
Finally, what is an acceptable downtime?
1% seems like a fairly good number isn’t it? That means 99% up-time. Well, contrary to what you may assume 1% is a ridiculously large amount of downtime.
Let’s assume you are an e-commerce company and it’s 4 days of holiday sale. Considering our above mentioned stat
4 days = 24 hours x 4 = 96 hours
96 hours = 96 x 60 = 5760 minutes
At 8000$ a minute,
5760 x $8000 = $46080000.
In fact, just 99.9% amounts to about 4 or 5 million dollars of losses a year.
Let me simplify that for you. That is $46 million dollars!
Be informed before your customers talk about it
The simplest way is to use a good web monitoring service to ensure you know your site outages before your customers do.
Be alerted before your losses start mounting!
Use a simple and efficient web monitoring tool that is light on your wallet. Let Insping help you keep a stable website today, tomorrow and everyday.
