With worldwide ecommerce on the rise year after year, experiencing website downtime can be an expensive problem for business. But what are the real costs and is there anything that can be done to avoid it?
By Abby Hardoon, CEO of Daily.co.uk
In order to keep websites up and running, commonly, every possible precaution is taken, emergency power generators on standby in case of power failures, the most technologically advanced hardware stored in the highest security facilities imaginable, backups taken of backups and so on, but yet the facts remain that for a website owner, there can only ever be the promise of 99.99% uptime.
And downtime can be costly. For the biggest web retailers such as Amazon, who reportedly had a turnover of just over $34 billion in 2010, if we make an assumption that traffic is uniform over a 24 hour period just 1 hour of downtime equates to $3.88 million in potential lost revenue alone.
The pain doesn’t stop there. After a two-hour glitch taking the site offline in 2008, not only did Amazon suffer the lost sales but the share price then tumbled 4.1% by that afternoon. For a company valued at $78bn, that 4.1% equates to $3.12bn being wiped off their value within a matter of hours.
Do visitors wait patiently until the site is back up and running? Given the tolerance of many of today’s web users, they might hang around for another 4 or 5 annoyed seconds, but the likelihood is that they will then simply go to another rival business and go about their business.
It’s not just lost sales that need to be considered. Downtime can lead to lost customer confidence or, worst of all, customers being forced to try out competitors and liking what they find.
When food retailing giant Sainbury’s website went down in 2008, web traffic analyst Experian Hitwise recorded 8.36% of their traffic going directly to their biggest competitor, Tesco.com, and a further 1.38% going to ASDA.
So what is a normal SME, whose income comes in part or wholly from their website, to learn from the downtime horror stories of the internet’s biggest players? Downtime can haemorrhage precious brand loyalty. It can be disruptive, disturbing and expensive.
What can you do about it? Well, the short answer might unfortunately remain ‘not very much’.
The longer answer is that while you may well never experience downtime on your website, it is worth being sure that those protecting it are taking every possible precaution they can – using emergency power supplies, technologically advanced hardware stored in the highest security facilities, the backups of backups.
And then it’s worth remembering that 99.99% uptime, while not perfect, is pretty darn close.
www.daily.co.uk
