The five major causes of website service interruption.

As a business owner with a web site, you know how important it is that your site stays up and running at all times.

Unfortunately, it is all too common for business owners to experience interruptions in their web site service. And in most cases, the business owner is not even going to be aware that it happened.

Web site visitors - who are potential customers - will be aware, however, when they try to visit the web site and find it is unavailable. This can give those potential customers an unfortunate impression of the business; after all, if even the web site isn’t working, doesn’t that mean the business itself isn’t very reliable?

Business owners with web sites should make it a top priority to ensure that their site is always up and running.

What causes these outages? There are many, many factors that can contribute to a web site service interruption.

According to Steve Walterhouse, Vice President of Web Service Guard, the five major reasons for IT failure are; software application failure, operating system failure, hardware server failure, network failure, and misconfiguration.  

20 percent of downtime is caused by technology failures, including hardware (servers and network devices), environmental factors (cooling and power outages) and natural disasters.

Forty percent of downtime is caused by application crashes, including bugs, incorrectly done updates, and software changes. The remaining 40 percent of downtime is caused by human error.

There are clearly numerous factors that can cause a website to go down, with potentially disastrous results for business owners.

“Our average customer facing website is down for over a total of 77 minutes (over an hour) every month,” according to Steve Walterhouse, vice president of Web Service Guard. “This is referred to as ‘customer outage minutes / month’. Web Service Guard helps our customers reduce their ‘customer outage minutes / month’ by notifying them as soon as their site goes down.”

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.

Web Service Guard, the premier website monitoring company, offers uptime and performance monitoring for websites and servers.  For more information, check our Website Monitoring page.