On Friday January 31, Coffee retailer giant Starbucks.com experienced a system outage that began at 7:09pm US ET, and finally ended at 10:09pm for an outage duration of 3 hours.

Starbucks.com is looking forward to better uptime in 2009 after suffering significant outages at year end of 2008.

So what does this mean to online retailers?

There is no such thing as patience on the Internet.  Even the most relaxed person lacks fundamental patience when they are sitting in traffic on the highway. They tend to boil over and make hasty decisions, all in their quest to get to their destination as fast as they can.

People tend to treat the Internet the same way. As far as patience and understanding go…there’s no such thing.

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.

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