Server/ Hosting Outages

If you are a e commerce site owner you know that this is the worst time possible to have server/ hosting issues with your site. These issues not only loose you potential customers but they are very stressful because you can do nothing to remedy the issue.

I am amazed at how many outages I have read and heard about this month. I have a number of coworkers who were caught up in an extended outage that took their sites and emails offline for several days back at the beginning of November. “Navisite, the US webhosting firm, is scrambling to fix an extended outage that is believed to have rendered tens of thousands of websites inoperable for more than three days. The company hopes to completely resolve the problem by Tuesday morning at the latest.

The interruption started Saturday as part of a planned move to replace a fleet of aging servers operated by Alabanza, which Navisite recently acquired. Navisite warned customers their websites would be down for several hours during the migration, but unexpected issues have caused the process to take much longer than originally anticipated.”

Unfortunately, on Monday another outage occurred that impacted many webmasters, it was the Rackspace’s outage. Although this outage only lasted hours and the issues were remedied it was still a huge inconvenience for site owners.

With all these outages webmasters are taking along hard look at how to prepare for server issues. The best thing you can do is keep an up to date back up of your site! Site hosts generally work to prevent data loss and “offline time” but it’s best to always be prepared!

Other webmasters use site monitoring programs such as AlertBot website monitoring, these resources typically alert you when your site is down so you can work with your hosing company to resolve the issue immediately.

Whatever you do just know that downtime unfortunately happens. Choose a web host that has a good reputation for remedying issues and who has minimal outages but know that sometimes there is nothing that the hosting company can do prevent the outage (like a car smashing into a power pole) and the best thing you can do is be prepared.