When businesses start looking for website hosts and developers, they will often find cheap offers that seem like they would be easy on the company budget. In many cases, cheap hosting services are only made possible because the service is willing to accept a high amount of downtime compared to more expensive hosts. If you are thinking about going with a cheap solution for your hosting, then check this out and see several ways by which downtime hurts your business.
Customers Cannot Place Orders
When your site experiences an abnormally high amount of downtime, it becomes difficult for your customers to get to your site to place orders. Your customers may also experience situations where the site goes down while they are placing an order, and that is just one way to make sure that those customers never come back.
Mission Critical Customers Will Abandon Your Business
You may find that some of your customers do not mind your downtime because you are passing the savings you are getting in your hosting service along to your customers. But the customers that use your business to buy mission critical products will not be able to utilize your business in the long-term. Most mission critical customers are both high volume and high profit clients, and losing these types of customers could put you out of business.
Downtime Affects Your Search Rankings
One criteria search engines use to rank websites is whether or not the site is available when the search engine tries to index it. If your website is on an unreliable host that experiences a lot of downtime, then search engines are going to find it difficult to index your site and give you priority in search results.
Business Partners Will Not Want To Link To Your Site
Downtime may be something you can put up with, but it is not something your business partners will tolerate. Most businesses pride themselves on their websites being available, and making sure that the links they offer their customers are valuable resources. If your website is constantly down, then it cannot be a valuable resource for your business partners or their clients.
Some business owners tolerate website downtime because it saves them money on their hosting service. But when you look at the real costs associated with too much downtime, you start to realize that saving a few dollars a month is not worth the thousands of dollars you may be losing in revenue.
Image courtesy of Leonid Mamchenkov via Flickr
