If you’re a business owner who depends on having a website for part or all of your business, you know how devastating it can be when your website goes down.

When customers go online to place an order or check on the progress of an order or ask a question about your services…the worst message that you can send them is a big white page with a “404 not found” message, or any other indication that your website is not available.

It’s the equivalent of a customer trying to go to your brick and mortar store in the middle of the day on a weekday, and finding that it’s locked up for no reason. It erodes trust and confidence in your business.

So the recent announcement by AT&T, the telecommunication giant, that the internet will start having serious outages by the year 2010 is especially alarming.

According to Jm Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, outages will occur because of the massive increase of demands caused by user-generated content, and by uploads of video and other types of media that tend to take up large amounts of bandwidth.

As more people switch to high definition video, which takes up more bandwidth than regular video, the strain on the internet’s infrastructure will only grow worse, Cicconi said.

Cicconi said that it is estimated that the internet will literally be at capacity by the year 2010, and widespread outages will occur.

An independent research group called the Nemertes Research Group has reached a similar conclusion.

The Nemertes Research Group has released research showing that increased internet usage is going to cause a drag on bandwidth and a slowdown of internet speed if infrastructure limits aren’t addressed soon.

If this happens, it’s going to have a significant impact on businesses who depend on a web presence.

Even before the internet reaches the point where it’s overloaded, there are all kinds of glitches that can interrupt service to a website without warning.

"Events occur every day that cause website outages, usually without the website owner or technical administrator’s knowledge," said Steve Walterhouse, Vice president of Web Service Guard.

Web Service Guard is a leading provider of electronic website uptime monitoring and notification services worldwide.

Deliberate attempts by hackers, system failures of a website hosting company, server issues, power outages caused by storms or other natural disasters, rolling brownouts that occur during the summer months when power companies are overloaded…all of these scenarios can knock your website offline.

If your website goes down in the evening, you may not find out about it until the next day. In the meantime, frustrated customers in different time zones who are awake and trying to do business with you will be shut out for hours.

Huge revenue dollars are lost.  The loss of customer trust and goodwill in a case like that can never be regained.

As demands increase and outages occur, proactive website monitoring is key.   An electronic monitoring company like Web Service Guard can immediately notify you if your website goes down, allowing you to take instant action to rectify the problem.

The web uptime monitor service that www.webserviceguard.com offers allows the business owner, or webmaster, to practice what is called the ‘management by exception’ technique.  ‘Management by Exception’ is defined as a management technique in which the manager only intervenes when employees, or services, fail to meet their performance standards.