Why are uptime and downtime important parameters?
Whether it’s for a hosting or a server, the parameters of uptime and downtime are essential to offer a performing service and a quality product.
To avoid structural problems and stem unexpected events, such as network interruptions, it is necessary to pay attention to the values of uptime and downtime of the service: to generate customers and conversions, in fact, a website must be online and reachable by users who visit.
Typically, hosting providers indicate these values in percentage terms to show customers the level of security and functionality of their infrastructure.
What is uptime?
Uptime indicates the operation at full capacity of a machine that carries out its activity without interruptions or malfunctions.
What is downtime?
The term downtime, therefore, indicates the period of inactivity of the machine linked to a series of factors that can be ordinary or extraordinary.
How to deal with planned downtime
Scheduled downtime is a necessary part of a hosting provider’s business because it affects all those infrastructure updating and maintenance activities. A web host that regularly maintains servers reduces the incidence of security vulnerabilities, increases performance and improves the customer experience.
To better manage a planned downtime it is useful to make a proactive communication to the customers concerned to notify the operation so that the customer can also organize his work.
Giving proper communication of the planned activity allows you to:
- Explain to customers the benefits of maintenance
- Reduce support tickets and customer confusion
- Collaborate with customers who can better manage their business, alerting their collaborators if necessary
- Create a better bond between you and the customers who will feel involved in the various projects
How to deal with unexpected downtime
Unplanned or unexpected downtime is obviously more difficult to manage, starting from the identification of the causes that can be multiple such as sudden increases in traffic, intrusion attempts by cyber pirates, obsolete software that lead to vulnerabilities, DDoS attacks, spam or hardware failure.
Even during an unexpected downtime it is essential to keep customers updated on the situation through support tickets, social networks or other chosen company channels.
How to prevent downtime?
There are no written rules to avoid downtime: unexpected events can always happen. However, there are some measures that can be observed to decrease the probability of downtime and ensure customers a safe and properly functioning system. Particularly:
- Make sure the software is always updated to the latest version
- Configure a firewall and restrict access to ports where critical services are listening
- Guarantee the services requested by users
- If you are sharing accounts, check the security of the users
- Protect directories with write permission
- Monitor the resources of servers and individual services by activating, for example, automatic notifications that inform of high loads or spikes
- Record all information about critical services, setting up notifications for certain events
- Keep up to date on new vulnerabilities in the services in use
- Automatically perform virus scans and checks on various services
With prevention and careful preparation, it is possible to avoid downtime that undermine the security of services and cause multiple problems for both websites and their visitors.
