Coffee retailer giant Starbucks.com is looking forward to better uptime in 2009 after suffering significant outages at year end of 2008. Starbucks.com suffered outages that totaled more than 2 hours downtime in the last 2 days.

So what does this mean to online retailers?

According to Forrester Research, online retail sales are expected to grow 12 percent, to $44 billion, this year, driven by higher internet traffic.

Clearly, online is where the money is – unless your business website goes down this holiday season and you don’t know about it for hours or day.

Many online retailers who do not have website monitoring, server uptime monitors, or web uptime monitor services in place are experiencing website outages due to an increase in internet traffic.  Business executives and small business owners should not leave their revenues to chance by assuming their web hosting department or partner is meeting the challenge.

For less than the price of a cup of coffee, business executives can insure their online revenue stream by being the first to know about a critical outage.  The simple registration requires no software download, install, or system privileges, and can easily be completed in 5 minutes or less.

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.