Maximizing Your Online Store's Uptime: Its not just hosting!
Running an e-commerce business isn't just about keeping your website up and running. Customers rely on your ability to serve them via telephone, fax, email, or other means, and it requires all of your systems to be working to be able to fulfill customer requests. Often, a single failure in your infrastructure can disable your ability to serve clients, ship orders, answer calls, and process transactions.
System downtime has a cost well beyond the time you spend fixing the product. The total cost of a system outage includes increased labor cost to handle customer service concerns, lost revenue from refunded or cancelled orders, customer dissatisfaction, and the opportunity costs in spending your time not working on your business.
There are a variety of different infrastructure components that an e-commerce business relies on to operate including electrical power, Internet access, website hosting, email, and core software applications. If any one of these systems fails, the ability to serve your customers can be disrupted.
If your Internet connection is down due to your DSL or cable provider system being unavailable, most of the typical e-commerce business's systems grind to a halt. Without Internet access, you are unable to send or receive email, produce shipping documents, or receive orders from your storefront. Setting up a wireless Internet access system as a back up to your primary ISP is a cost effective way to reduce your system downtime.
When you have multiple ISP access points, you'll need to set-up your network to use both your primary and secondary services. Inexpensive, but powerful, routers can be configured to monitor the ISP access of your providers, and automatically route your Internet access via whatever service is up. This keeps your operations running without disruption, even if your DSL or cable is down.
Losing your telephone service is another major infrastructure risk. Both clients and vendors are unable to reach you if the phones are down. The new breed of Internet based toll free service providers can provide a creative, and inexpensive solution for back-up telephone services. These services allow you to program the routing of your inbound phone calls to your landline, mobile phone, VOIP phone, or a combination of them. Setting up your inbound calls to route to an alternate number (such as your cell phone) if there is no answer on your landline is easily done.
In areas of the country where power is less reliable, you need to be creative in the set-up of your electrical systems. Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS's) can give you short-term back-up power, while assuring you have clean, spike free electricity flowing to your devices. Make sure all your critical equipment has a UPS including routers, modems, switches, phones, servers, and of course your PCs.
An inexpensive solution for longer-term power outages is to have a back-up generator available onsite. You can pick-up an inexpensive generator at your local home center, and you can have an electrician install a basic generator connection switch to your circuit panel. In the event of a power outage, you can start-up your generator, plug it into the generator transfer switch, and flip a couple switches, and all your systems can be operating. Make sure you test this system occasionally to make sure your generator starts easily, and that you have configured you switch on the proper circuits.
Using reliable hosting companies for your website and on-line stores is critical to making sure your business can serve clients. Don't focus only on the site hosting, but also make sure all systems that plug into your store are high availability providers (payment processing, authorizing network, etc.)
To protect yourself from a disaster like a fire, flood, or theft, make sure you are backing up on-line store's data files at least weekly, and store the back-up off site. Make sure you get copies of data that might be on various PCs at your business.
It is important that you test all your redundant, and back up systems periodically to make sure they are working. There is nothing worse than having a critical system outage and then find out your back-up systems aren't working. Then you are attempting to fix TWO systems, not one. Keep the back-up and redundant systems operational when things are running well to make sure you can continue your business operations when a major outage occurs.
Investing in redundant and back-up systems for your web-based store is prudent. A business that does only five hundred thousand dollars in business can lose over one hundred dollars per hour when systems are down. If your systems are down 1% of the time, your cost can be over three thousands dollars per year, plus a major disruption to you and your staff's lives. Careful planning, and inexpensive redundant systems can pay for themselves very quickly.
Article Source: http://www.search-raven.com
About the Author
Edward Cole's online baby shower party store has served thousands of clients. Edward is part of the management team at PartyPail.com, and he will tell you that the rubber ducky baby shower is one of the most popular themes.
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