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

If you were to launch an online business, say, “abc.com” that sells alphabet letters online, you may check your site from time to time as validation that customers can reach your site to make purchases.

What would your reaction be if, when typing “abc.com” into your browser location, you received a 404-Page not found error?  You may wonder what was wrong with your website.  You may call your web hosting provider or create a support ticket.  You may take drastic action such as switch to another web hosting provider.

The real question is, “How long could my website be down before I would consider it a critical business event?”  The answer to this question varies widely among those surveyed.  The more a business owner has at stake, the more they are interested in assurance that their website is functioning properly from their customers’ point of view.

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.

Management by exception is growing in popularity among managers, and it is no question why. This form of management is a style where managers do as little as possible, instead they delegate it to people below them, or outsource it to vendors, and only step in when they have to. So, it is the idea of minimizing responsibility.

Now I can see why you might be thinking, “What kind of business owner would let their managers manage this way?” and that is a great question. It seems sort of contradictory to say the manager does not do anything until a problem occurs, because isn’t their job to manage? Yes, that is true, and yet this style of management has proven to be extremely successful for some organizations.

So, why does this management style work for some? It is based around the concept or policy that states that the most effective use of your managers is not as a babysitter, but rather management should devote its time to investigating only those situations in which actual results differ significantly from planned results.

Website monitoring allows the manager to focus on business issues, and notifies them only when corrective action is necessary.

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

Over 70 per cent of UK marketing executives say that it would be a serious problem or a complete disaster if their organisation experienced website downtime, a Zeus Technology survey reveals.

Of those questioned, 46 per cent admit that they are unsure whether or not they have a system in place to manage peaks of online traffic, while 53 per cent say if their website went down for one day, they would lose more than £10,000 in lost revenue, CBR Online reports.

And 65 per cent of marketing professionals state that they rarely or never spend time with the IT department in order to prepare for potential peaks in website traffic, the vendor’s research discovers.

Commenting on the findings, Graham Moore, e-retail specialist at Zeus Technology, says: “Consumers won’t think twice about abandoning their purchase if they experience downtime or a slowdown in service, so addressing this issue is critical in coming months.”

The chief executive officer of the vendor Paul Brennan recently warned that the infrastructure a website relies on must be scalable so that it can flexibly deal with fluctuating requirements.

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

I am sure that many companies were asking the same questions last May 2008 when theplanet.com, a large hosting provider,  suffered a raging fire that lead to an extended data center outage affecting 9000 servers (see http://www.centernetworks.com/the-planet-outage-fire-houston).  We knew immediately that sites were down via our uptime monitoring service http://www.webserviceguard.com.

So this leads us to the followings question:  What variables must be considered when choosing a data center?  To answer this, we must look at the single points of failure a hosting provider is susceptible to.

Let’s review what components a data centers relies on to provide service.
1.    Storage / Hard drive
2.    Network adapter
3.    Database
4.    Server
5.    Network line / network usage limit
6.    Power line / power usage limit
7.    Building infrastructure
8.    Third party uptime monitoring service

What disaster recovery plans does your prospective data center provider have in place to overcome
a failure in each of these components?

More importantly, when was the last time the hosting provider tested their disaster recovery plans for each of the above mentioned components, and what was the recovery time for each?

Ideally, they would have a hot failover location ready and waiting to perform a hot failover of any subset of data/service should any component at the primary location fail.

In the real world many times this is cost prohibitive since the cost of a full hot failover location can only be justified for the most critical applications, such as military operations, power grid operations, banking, stock market operations, etc.

However, how close your prospective data center provider comes to a full hot failover location can mean the difference between your website being down for 1 hour and your website being down for 4 to 7 days.  In this day and age most companies rely on their websites for marketing and revenue generation.  It is obviously important to look at components that your provider offers so that your online revenue stream is not affected.

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

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