The goal of most businesses is to sell their product or service and grow their audience. However, in order to make a profit and grow as a company, you need to be firing on all cylinders. There is a lot of competition in the world of business, and your company and website alike need to be performing at their best.
While most of the time this is no problem, that isn’t always true. For example, many companies will go through periods of downtime every now and then which can stop your businesses productivity. So why is downtime so bad? Well not only can your system or website being down stop your employees from working, but it can also turn customers or users off, and force them to do business with a competitor.
This can all culminate in your company losing thousands of dollars every minute, or more. We don’t need to explain to you how terrible that can be. As a result, you want to do all you can to stop downtime in its tracks. With that in mind, this article is going to take a closer look at how to prevent or minimize downtime at your business.
Be Sure to Monitor
While downtime unfortunately happens, it doesn’t often come out of nowhere. There is normally a reason for downtime occurring. This can be anything from a rise in traffic to machine failure or even human error. One way to know about these issues before they can become a huge error and lead to downtime is to use some type of Website monitoring software.
These tools can allow you to manually or automatically monitor the health of your site, company or infrastructure. They will often alert you when something is out of the ordinary, which will give you time to address or fix it before it affects your end user. Without monitoring your site, you may be in the dark about why potential issues are taking place and may not even know about them until a user or customer complains.
Ensure Employees are Well-Trained
While we mentioned that human error is a potential cause of downtime, what we didn’t mention is that it is actually among the leading causes of downtime. As a result, it is important to make sure your employees are trained well. They need to know what to do, what to avoid and how to use all the technology that they need for their job. If not, they could make errors that could potentially lead to downtime.
Also, be sure to do periodic retraining as well. Software, programs, and technologies are always undergoing updates that can change their functionality. You need to ensure that your employees are not only always aware of these changes, but know how to handle them. Sure, training your employees can take a decent amount of time and money, but think of it as an investment.
Use Load-Balancing Solutions
Another common reason for downtime or slow loading times is an influx of traffic. Your website server is only able to support so much traffic before it eventually slows down or even crashes. One of the best ways to handle issues like this is to use a load-balancing solution like a content delivery network (CDN) or another load balancer.
Using a load balancer of some kind isn’t always the cheapest option, but it is among the most effective. Load balancing is when you distribute your network traffic across a variety of different servers, to maintain good site performance. This decreases the burden on your server, while also upping the reliability of your site to prevent possible downtime due to server overload.
We sincerely hope that this article has been able to help you reduce and minimize IT downtime at your company. Downtime can be terrible for your business and profit, so you should be doing all that you can to keep it to a minimum.
