Why is uptime so important?
When it comes to choosing a dedicated server, one of the top-selling points is an uptime guarantee. Our uptime guarantee is 100%, whereas many others can only guarantee 99.99%. But why is this information so important? Here are some of the reasons why bare metal servers should be used.
1. The direct cost of downtime
The average downtime in 2019 was about 200 minutes. The direct cost of downtime for the average small-medium business (lost sales) was approximately £640 per outage. If there are two downtime periods a month, this could equate to a loss of more than £15,000 a year.
And larger businesses can suffer significantly more. When Amazon.com went offline for just two hours, they lost $3.48 million.
2. The indirect costs
While the direct costs are very easy to measure, it can be harder to do the same for indirect costs. This is because you don’t know how many visitors tried to get onto your site and have now abandoned your brand. The potential of their lost sales is incalculable.
In addition, you might get negative press from the outage. This can cause more customers, or potential customers, to stay away from your website in the future. This is especially true if the outage has been caused due to hacking.
3. Lost working opportunities
So many companies are now operating with work stored on servers. If there’s downtime, then staff can’t complete their tasks. This can reduce their productivity and upset customers who are waiting for support. For instance, even fulfilling orders can be challenging without access to information saved on the server.
This can be frustrating even for staff. If your website experiences too many outages, staff might become so frustrated that they begin looking for new employment. Recruiting replacements and training them to use your systems is hard, expensive work.
4. Legal implications
Sometimes downtime occurs due to criminal activity. For instance, a hacker gains access to your system, causing a DDoS attack and stealing data from you at the same time. Under GDPR laws, you must report all of these incidents to the relevant legislative bodies.
If your data has been found to not be secure, you could face a fine, which can be very costly to your business. Many small to medium businesses don’t survive after they’ve suffered a massive data breach.
Conclusion
If you want to ensure your business operates all of the time, you need to find dedicated servers that can offer you 100% uptime.