Synthetic Monitoring
Improving performance and eliminating downtime are two sides of the same coin when it comes to client conversions on your company’s web platforms. While the former is related to improving sales, the latter is concerned with keeping the sales your business already has. If your business has never needed to recover from an outage, consider yourself lucky: 90 percent of companies have experienced unplanned downtime.
One of Apica’s close partners, AppDynamics, recently published an eye-opening infographic on “The True Cost of Downtime.” While a few hours of downtime every year might seem like a drop in the bucket, the reality is that these costs can accumulate to a major loss of revenue.
What Downtime Means for Your Business
An SMB that brings in under $50 million in annual revenue stands to lose around $8,580 per hour of downtime. Even at a 99.9 percent uptime rate, that’s over $75,000 per year. The numbers get worse as downtime increases: 99.5 percent uptime equates to over $375,000 in lost business, whereas 99 percent uptime means more than $750,000 in lost revenue.
To put those numbers in perspective, a website that is online 99.9 percent of the time is actually offline 86 seconds a day or 10 minutes a week. Even brief, recurring outages can add up to a lot of money. A minute outage here and there at $143 apiece can pile up over time.
What Downtime Means for the Industry
On a larger scale, businesses lose a staggering amount of money every year because of unplanned downtime. According to the IDC, Fortune 1000 companies lose between $1.25 billion and $2.5 billion every year because of application outages. A company that brings in more than $1 billion in annual revenue could lose around $686,000 in revenue per minute of downtime. Some of those outages come down to data center failures that are outside of the business’s control, but many outages stem from improperly configured and insufficient hosting structure, which could be avoided with adequate preparation.
Turning Downtime into Uptime
In many cases, outages don’t just happen; there are signs leading up to infrastructure failure that companies can look out for. For example, load testing services not only let a company know how much traffic their platforms can handle, but also help the company develop a plan to increase capacity as needed. Website and application monitoring take an active role in gauging performance and can alert companies of problems with their platforms before they become major issues.
If your business is looking to maximize potential revenue by minimizing downtime, the experts at Apica are ready to help. Contact us today to get started.