Today Internet search engine giant Yahoo.com experienced a system outage that began at 4:09am US ET, and finally ended at 6:49am for an outage duration of close to 3 hours.

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 are experiencing website outages due to higher than normal internet traffic this holiday season.  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.

For more information, go to www.webserviceguard.com.