Tarun Gupta

Effective Strategies for Managing Web Hosting Downtime?

Tarun Gupta | Jan 24th, 2014 | Web Hosting Resources

The domain of technology has become more critical and demanding as millions of online business websites start focusing on customer acquisition and service delivery. What appears the most significant now is the availability of the complete service basket with uninterrupted delivery. Irrespective of the size and the strength of the delivery module you follow, a fully tested web hosting backup plan is what you must associate with your service to complement any sort of outage if occurs.

Sketch A Backup Plan To Face Outage

Regardless of their size and strength, it's quite tough for small and mid-size businesses and a web hosting solution provider to prevent the outage completely. However, with proper planning and cautious selection of technology, they can reduce the intensity of damage.

This is very significant if a solution provider is willing to reduce the downtime and restore the service. Service reliability and customer data protection are the key issues to be addressed while preparing the data backup plan.

Even the hosting providers with their own Data Center Hosting infrastructure, put in place a robust website data and information backup plan for their subscribers. End of the day data centers is the entities answerable to subscribers' critical online operations and revenue aspirations. Following are a few quick points that help you to lessen the damage in case an outage happens.

Take Regular Website Backups

Make it your habit as your business means a lot to you. If you are into the business of lead generation you can afford outages a bit but if frequent transactions are executed on your website, it may cost you thousands of dollars and of course a dig in revenue and customer base. Keep daily backups of your website and the associated systems your website accesses.

This is the basic requirement to be fulfilled. Ask your web host to do so if you are not so much technical. This is the primary responsibility of your web host to give your website a safety cover against data loss. You may yourself do it using free software such as FileZilla to copy all of the data and files to your systems.

Choose The Hosting Options Available

When you go to choose a service provider or a data center hosting for your business, keep your options open. Never rely on the inflated banners claiming 100 % server uptime and other flowery returns. It's better to leave a brand if it fails to fulfill what was promised earlier. A small hosting firm can even offer the level of service and trust you are looking forward to.

If you find one trustworthy and committed web host who ensures the data backup policy in a service-level agreement without hidden terms. The requirement of the hosting resource is directly proportional to the level of services you offer. It influences your options to choose between Shared hosting, VPS hosting, or Dedicated hosting. The complexity prevails in the service offerings requires more than a solid backup plan.

Logging And Monitoring

The phrase “prevention is better than cure” sits right. The same goes for your website. Rather than waiting for the disaster to happen, it's better to keep track and monitor your website logs. Don't live in the assumption that your host will manage everything for you.

Instead, you can yourself retain some level of control by taking your backups. It's therefore a good idea to maintain a manual log of a number if events such as what changes are made to the site, who made the changes, and when. There are monitoring services and software available that can help you in the initiative.

Be Proactive If Outage Occurs

First and foremost, do all that I have suggested above. Nevertheless if the outage occurs, don't panic. Notify your web host and communicate with your customers about the outage with an appropriate apology. Mention them clearly when services will be resumed. For a long cessation, give periodic updates to your customers.


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