Business Continuity and Uptime | Storm Internet

Do you know the “true” cost of your website being down for an hour?

We know of a case where a website crash once cost the business at least $100,000 because there was no business continuity plan in place. This particular website went down during a webinar for a $10,000 coaching program. The webinar page itself stayed up but the sudden surge of traffic caused the checkout page to go down right as they were in the middle of their sales pitch – disaster! When the checkout page went down, there were around 500 people on the webinar. While they were able to salvage some of the sales with a replay the next day but the replay only had 200 participants tuning in.

That means the business lost out on the opportunity to pitch an extra 200 people who showed up the first time.

With a 5% conversion rate being standard (and conservative) for a high-priced coaching program an extra 200 people means an extra 10 sales. That means they ended up losing out on about $100,000 in sales because the website went down at the worst time imaginable.

While this is an extreme example of a website going down at the worst possible time, every time your website is unavailable or goes offline you are losing money.

There is a concept called Business Continuity which involves extensive planning and preparation for these kinds of worst case scenarios.

What is business continuity?

There are 3 main components to business continuity which are:

1. RESILIENCE. The first level of business continuity is designing everything in a way which is resilient to various threats and disasters. For example, identifying and shoring up defenses to cyber attacks and making sure that your servers are prepared for a sudden influx of traffic such as in the webinar example.  Ensuring uptime!
2. RECOVERY. Your website will almost certainly crash at some point. Do you have a recovery plan? How long will it take you to get your site back up? Having a recovery plan makes a huge difference in reducing the time it takes to get your site back up after it crashes.
3. CONTINGENCY. Last but certainly not least are contingency options. If for some reason you are not able to get your website back up in a reasonable amount of time or in more dire cases for weeks or months, what will you do then?

These three elements work together to form a robust business continuity plan – essential in today’s online business world.

So what is the true cost of having your website go down for an hour?

You’ve probably never thought about the true cost of having your website go down for even an hour.

While it’s easy to put a pounds lost amount on situations like the one above, there are other “hidden” costs to your website going down such as :

• Lost opportunities and man hours. If you have an Ecommerce site, you are obviously losing sales every minute that your website is down. But even if you don’t make sales on your website you are still losing opportunities to gather leads, educate prospects and be found online. Additionally, you lose man hours as your team has to focus on getting the website back up rather than using those man hours on something that generates more value in the business.
• Damage to your brand. Have you ever clicked a link from a blog or email only to get that dreaded 404 message? If you’re like most web searchers, chances are you never went back. Having your website crash makes your entire business look unprofessional.
• Damage to search rankings. While a one-time crash of an hour or so probably won’t affect your search results, frequent and long-term crashes do. If your site is going down frequently it is probably taking your Google rankings with it.

Business continuity is important because your website is going to crash – it’s inevitable. 

That your website is going to crash is a given, it’s what happens next that will determine the success of your business.

Having a business continuity plan in place will help you minimize or outright eliminate the true cost of your website being down for an hour or longer.

In this article you learned about the 3 concepts of business continuity which are:

• Resilience
• Recovery
• Contingency

Why not take a moment to rank your website on those 3 concepts?

• Is your website resilient to attacks and crashes?
• How long does it take your website to recover from a crash?
• What do you do if your site goes down for an extended period of time but you still need to do business online?

Answering these questions is the first step to creating a business continuity plan to protect your business from lost opportunity, wasted man hours and damage to your brand and search rankings.

Don’t let that happen to your business! Start your business continuity planning today!

If you would like to learn more about how Storm Internet can help your business click here or give us a call us on 0800 817 4727