What happens when your site goes down?
A lot of things, and none of them very good. As your website is the front face of the brand, you may lose credibility with an inactive or unstable site. Your search rankings and profits will also be negatively affected. This could occur for any number of reasons, from low-quality hosting, to hacking, to traffic overload. Thankfully, there are steps you can take, and solutions at your fingertips. Troubleshooting the problem as well as taking preventative measures can help mitigate the consequences of a downed website.
1. Make Sure Your Website Has Actually Gone Down
It's possible that there may be a client-side issue. It is important to verify the issue before continuing onto the next steps. It is possible that your website may not have been downed at all.
2. Have a Crisis Plan Prepared
Working in an online setting means that technological problems will occur no matter how foolproof your website may seem; it's just a part of the platform. Having a crisis plan prepared with instructions and important contact information for both your technical support time and necessary shareholders will be extremely useful. You've done all your work for yourself, which means less scrambling when the site goes down.
3. Communicate with Your Technical Support Team
There is a lot of work that goes into keeping a website up, and that means there could also be multiple problems. Common issues include a programming error on the website, a DNS problem, an expired domain, a networking problem, a single server issue that caused it to crash, or the entire server has crashed. Each of these problems have different solutions that often involve running command prompts. Running these diagnostics are complicated and can seem daunting.
In situations like this, your IT team is your best friend. Your technical support group will usually have the solution to your problem, and it may be as easy as reloading something or changing some code. If it's more complicated than that, it may require contacting your domain host to resolve it. Unfortunately, a more complicated solution may mean more time with the website down, and that is a lot of money and business lost. Sometimes problems may take minutes to resolve, but sometimes they may take days. The good thing is, there will always be people there to help. But what if you want to make sure you don't lose out on client service, revenue, or brand reputation?
4. Ensure this Doesn't Happen Again with a Backup Solution
Having a website down in the middle of peak hours is an expensive problem. It's worth investing in a solution that keeps it from ever costing your company again.
Like a crisis plan, the answer is to make sure it never goes down in the first place. Thankfully, there are premade backup options already available built specifically for problems like these. Take Dovetail Internet Technologies and their A.V.O.I.D system, for example.
Here's how it works:
A.V.O.I.D, or Advanced Virtual Online Interruption Detection system gives the company with a website down for whatever reason Emergency Page Hosting to make sure that your customers still have access to vital information associated with your brand. They also include a Managed DNS service with every A.V.O.I.D domain.
When your original website is down, the emergency page hosting will automatically detect this through their service. Once it gets that notification, it immediately switches the domain to a backup side that mirrors the original. Though smaller at one to three pages, this "mini-backup site" will retain the design of the original, as well as links to third-party sites such as online banking. A message will be automatically displayed, explaining that the site is temporarily under maintenance to confused clients while automatically providing them with contact information to keep from losing business. This automated process provides valuable time for your IT team to get to work fixing the issue without losing money, time, or business in the process.
Having a backup site is one of the most valuable tools an online service can have, as it prevents that loss of profits, customer satisfaction, and avoids showing the clients that there was any issue in the first place, thereby saving the brand's reputation.
Whether your site has already had multiple issues in the past, or you're making sure to prevent one happening in the future, it's never too early to invest in a plan to keep it safe and sound.
