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Downtime is extremely bad news for a website. It means that nobody can access your site, which means you can potentially lose a new customer or stop someone placing an order, which they’ll then go and do on a competitor’s site. That’s why you need to aim for 100% uptime if at all possible. Here are some simple tips to prevent website downtime.
- Prevent hackers bringing down your website
One of the main reasons a website might go down is a targeted attack on your site. Some ways you can prevent this include:
- Keeping software is up to date
- Ensure you have security plugins
- Use secure passwords – not the default ones
- Have backups of your data so you can get things back online quickly
A hack shouldn’t have the ability to ruin your business, so make sure you are protected and can recover quickly if there is an attack.
- Use reliable hosting
Reliability of your hosts and servers is key. Otherwise, it could potentially be very easy for your site to go down. Use data center power management so that, even in the event of a power cut, your site stays up. You should also have backup servers in case of a fire, flood or other disaster, so if something goes wrong with one server, your site simply switches to another.
- Use monitoring software
If you don’t monitor your site, then your first indication that something is wrong will probably be when you start getting angry e-mails or calls from frustrated customers. There are a number of types of software that can be installed which keep an eye on your site constantly, so the second it goes down, you get an alert and can take action. You may also want your IT team to be altered, with someone on call to take care of issues.
Website downtime can cost you dearly in the long run. It can make your business look unprofessional and mean that clients don’t even give your business a chance. They’re likely to just go elsewhere and use a competitor’s service instead. That’s why you should follow the above tips and also keep tabs on what’s going on with your site to see where improvements can be made. It’s not always easy to keep track of your website, so it’s worth automating systems wherever you can and ensuring your site is reliable, fast and stays up as much as possible.
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