Informational technologies power our interconnected world. In this day and age, a strong online presence is necessary for a business to be successful. Most companies come face-to-face with their clients through the web. This is also where most of the business revenues are created. 

If you do not have a smooth-running and accessible website, web-related investments can go down the drain. If you have a website, but the website outage status checker reveals your website to be always offline, the same thing will happen. Or worse, your company’s operation can come to a full and abrupt halt.

Your website needs to stay online

Consider your website as your traditional brick and mortar store. If you’re always offline, it is similar to your physical store being padlocked. In the process, you lose money and opportunity. Moreover, to add insult to injury, you might find your customer going to your competitor instead.

Google can also impose a sanction on you by dropping your rank from its search result pages, significantly decreasing your site’s traffic. The penalty can last for a couple of months, depending on the severity of the issue. By the time you have recovered your ranking, your customers are long gone.

Apart from those mentioned above, a website that is often offline can have a negative effect on your brand image.

Improve your brand image by making your business accessible to your site visitors. If you keep this up, you will create a trustworthy, reliable, and professional image.

Outage is costly

Huge brands like Twitter, Microsoft, eBay, Google, and Amazon also experience serious system downtime. In 2013, for instance, a website outage status checker showed Amazon went offline for 30 minutes. During this time, they lost roughly $66,240 per minute.

That was not the first time they lost millions for a short-period downtime. In 2008, Amazon also went offline for two full hours, and given the fact that they make $29,000 per minute, a 120-minute downtime cost them $3.48 million loss.

If a small-scale e-commerce store or business website goes offline, their bottom line revenue will be adversely affected. What’s even challenging to quantify is the repercussion of the brand’s credibility and reputation.

How to calculate website uptime?

In web hosting, uptime is defined as the time the server is operational and available. Uptime is a crucial metric to consider when selecting a web host.

The usual 99.99% guaranteed uptime offered by most web hosts equates to downtime of 8.76 hours per year. Here are the usual uptime guarantees and their corresponding downtime duration:

80% uptime means 4.8 hours of downtime per day, 1.4 days downtime per week, 6.2 days downtime per month, and 73.2 days downtime per year.

90% uptime means 2.4 hours downtime per day, 16.8 hours downtime per week, three days downtime per month, and 36.5 days downtime per year.

95% uptime means 1.2 hours downtime per day, 8.4 hours downtime per week, 1.5 days downtime per month, and 18.25 days downtime per year.

99% uptime means 14.4 minutes of downtime per day, 1.68 hours of downtime per week, 7.20 hours of downtime per month, and 3.65 days of downtime per year.

The ideal uptime guarantee is 99.99999%, which means 8.64 milliseconds of downtime per day, 60.48 milliseconds of downtime per week, 262.97 milliseconds per month, and 3.15 seconds per year.

To avoid severe loses from prolonged downtime and maximize profits, it is best to check the status of your website regularly using established website status checkers.