How to Prevent Website Downtime
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How to Prevent Website Downtime
‘Tis the season to be on edge, as masses of online shoppers bring the potential for revenue—and the possibility of causing Website slowdowns. -
Understand Your Audience
Be aware of whom your audience is, rather than making decisions based on outdated assumptions. The more you understand your audience, the more you can ensure that your infrastructure is aligned to avoid downtime. -
Questions to Ask
Ask yourself: Which geographic regions do visitors come from? Is your web strategy sufficient to reach them? How much traffic comes from mobile visitors? Do you hand mobile traffic the same way you do wire traffic? -
Partner Wisely
Good partners ensure that customers connect to a website quickly, easily and consistently, so it's vital to find the right match for your specific needs. -
Choosing Vendors
Look for partners who carefully monitor their networks and alert you when problems arise. -
Be an Enforcer
Service-level agreements define the minimum performance standards a provider must meet in terms of speed, latency and availability. Enforce them to get the most out of partners. -
SLAs Are Nonnegotiable
Service level agreements usually are not negotiable, so be familiar with your agreement terms and monitor external networks to hold providers accountable. -
Don't Put Your Eggs in One Basket
Don't rely on one content delivery network or cloud provider to connect with customers. A single endpoint limits the ability to redirect traffic; there is no backup solution in case of outages, hijacks or disruption. Consider multiple data centers, cloud providers and CD ends. -
Monitor Internally and Externally
Monitoring external networks can provide insights into how customers connect to your company. If the data center goes down or a cloud provider has slowdowns, you can route traffic to another center. -
Extend Security Beyond Your Firewall
Looking beyond your firewall can help you mitigate against DNS-based DDoS attacks, BGP hijacks and DNS cache poisoning. -
Plan for Human Error
Create a safe operating environment and avoid downtime by routing traffic around data centers that are undergoing updates. In other words, isolate data centers that are in flux to protect your uptime.
News that the company site is down can be a CIO's worst-case scenario. Website outages annoy customers and can cause significant losses in sales and profits. They shake customers' confidence in your site and can push them to a competitor, costing significant revenue. Today, companies compete in an always-on Web environment. Whether you run a fast-growing e-commerce startup or a Fortune 500 company, customers expect your Website to be available and reachable 24/7. Here are tips to avoid the nightmare of downtime by Corey Hamilton, product marketing manager at Dyn, a cloud-based Internet performance company. While these considerations can help many companies avoid downtime, sometimes outages happen despite the best preparation. Companies that succeed during downtime don't just have redundancy, load-balancing measures and other tactics in place—they also have an emergency plan.
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