Ins and Outs of Downtime
In the last financial quarter eBay managed to keep its turnover at just over $2 billion. While giant online seller Amazon also did a lot better than expected raking in $4.26 million. A slightly more modest example would be Manchester-based Maxafi which believes that its turnover in the three months that will include Christmas will be around £500,000. A highly important aspect of all these companies success revolves around their websites and the ease of use and simplicity that they offer. Bidding on eBay could not be simpler; purchasing a book on Amazon is an extremely simple three stage process. This is why companies like these are so successful they have given the public an easy way to buy from them, huge choice and simple payment systems. One of the biggest worries for all these companies is downtime. With a three month turnover of $2 billion if the eBay site is not available for just 0.1% of those three months that represents a $200,000 loss of income. If Amazon is down for only one hour in that three month period they will lose $353,000 in turnover. Obviously the stakes are high for these big companies, keeping their sites in front of their customers is essential to keep the digital tills ringing. The same is true for Maxafi, just because its turnover considerably less does not mean that the loss that they feel will not be equivalent. When a website is down it can only be bad for business in all kinds of ways, firstly there is the loss of income but there is also customer dissatisfaction. If the site is down often customers will simply drift away and find another site or simply change their Internet browsing habits. Planned downtime is unavoidable, IT departments need to switch off the site in order to do running maintenance, many big sites perform maintenance every day. This downtime is planned to coincide with the quietest possible hour of the day for these companies. In fact 80% of all downtime is planned; unfortunately the remaining 20% is not. This unplanned downtime will often arrive at the busiest period in the sites day. This is perhaps just one of the laws of nature that says it is bound to happen when you least want it to. Alternatively downtime arrives in the busy periods because that is when the hardware and software are at their most stretched. Over 40% of all unplanned downtime results from employee error, another 20% as a result of an error in an application, operations overrun adds another 15% to the possible reasons why a site may be unavailable. Another aspect is that planned downtime is used to improve and repair the systems that run the site. Unexpected downtime has no benefits, with IT engineers simply scrambling to get the site back online in the shortest possible time. The latest year for which any figures are available indicate that in the US alone during 2003 downtime cost US businesses over $9 billion. In 2003 Internet business is still in its infancy the effects now will be far more dramatic. Businesses that work on high turnover and low profit margins are the worst affected, a good example would be an airline reservation site which could easily lose over $100,000 for each hour it is off-line. These commercial kinds of sites are not the worst hit by unplanned downtime big financial institutions can suffer huge losses in moments of site unavailability. Some financial institutions can lose a staggering $300,000 not per hour, but for every single minute of the site is unavailable. It is essential that all sites maintain the lowest possible amount of unplanned downtime by utilising the best services they can possibly afford and put importance on web site performance
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About the Author:Darrell F writing about the importance of website monitoring and load testing.
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Ins and Outs of Downtime