Your website should be a fundamental part of your business. Through it, you can acquire new customers, answer support queries and provide customers with valuable information about your business or organization. This means that your website’s uptime — the time it stays online without glitches should be significant.
But how can you achieve maximum website uptime for your website?
Get a good website hosting provider
It almost starts with a good website host. Most website hosting companies guarantee 99.99% uptime, but don’t take them by their word. While most great ones like BlueHost, Site Ground actually deliver, a good number of so-called web hosting companies fail terribly. Be cautious especially of cheap hosting companies; they tend to stack a lot of website into a single server hence starving your site of resources.
Get a good developer
In most cases, your website will be down because of something wrong within the site itself, not the hosting provider. You want to invest in a good website designer or developer who has good knowledge of modern frameworks, libraries and Content Management Systems(CMS). Your website could go down because of internal bugs caused by the site code itself, outdated or poorly configured plugins, compromised website by malware and hackers. Always have a developer on retainer to be on standby to respond to incidents concerning your website. Most clients think it’s the responsibility of the hosting provider to fix everything about their website, but in some cases, it’s you or the developer to fix your issues.
Maintain backups of your website
This is often critical but neglected part of ensuring website uptime. Having updated backups of your website means you can recover from an incident in the shortest time possible. Depending on how busy and updated your website is, it’s good practise to have backups on daily, weekly or monthly basis. Some hosting providers support this feature, but in most cases, it’s up-to you to backup your website. Be sure to backup both the website files and the database.
Signup to Website Uptime monitoring service
Lastly it’s one thing for your website to go offline, it’s another for you to know it’s gone down. It’s very likely that you won’t be checking your site every minute or every hour to check if it’s up. The best option is to signup to website uptime monitoring service that automates this process for you. Site Monki will do this for you starting with a low-end free tier. We monitor your website uptime, check SSL certificates and domain expiry. We then send you alerts when your website is down or domain/SSL is about to expire. You can learn more or sign up now for Free.