Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

You are probably well aware of the negative impact downtime can have on your website and your company as a whole. Any period of downtime can quickly result in lost sales and leads, a factor which multiplies depending on the average traffic your website usually receives. What’s worse is that those lost sales and leads are likely to go to your competitors, as frustrated potential customers shop elsewhere for the product or service they were looking for on your website.

If you’re a business owner, or are responsible for the maintenance of a company’s web presence, you will know that website downtime can happen at the most inconvenient of times. Unplanned downtime is never welcome. Your website is the online face of your business, and any period in which it is inaccessible to your clients and customers can damage the reputation of your brand.

Whatever the nature of your business, whether you are a freelancer or an online retailer, the quality of your website is key to the success of your organisation. A well-run website serves as the online storefront of your organisation, acting as the destination point for people who are searching for the services you provide or the products you sell. Are you confident that you have all the main bases covered when it comes to the management of your website?

An extended period of website downtime is the stuff of nightmares for companies large and small. For a company such as Amazon, even one single minute of downtime can cost as much as $220,318.80 according to the latest calculations. For smaller companies, that figure will be minuscule in comparison, but it’s a number which can quickly snowball the longer your website is offline.

Are you starting up a new business website, or just looking to change hosting to a new provider? Identifying the right web host for your website can be a real headache for businesses. There are so many providers out there, all offering a variety of features that all appear quite similar, making it difficult to determine which hosting is right for you. To help you choose a web hosting provider, we will first aim to help you define the hosting needs for your website.

Black Friday has quickly become the biggest retail event of the year in the UK, and sales and marketing staff are busy preparing themselves for what can be a make or break week for businesses. What started as an American shopping tradition following Thanksgiving has spread in recent years to become a worldwide phenomenon, with shoppers holding out for Black Friday and Cyber Monday (the online shopping equivalent of Black Friday) to buy gifts ahead of the Christmas holiday season.

When it comes to website and search engine optimisation one of the first topics that comes up is page speed. In the case of SEO, for example, we know that Google looks at page speed when determining the ranking of pages in its search engine. There are many means of measuring page speed, but little is known about how Google themselves distinguish a slow loading page from a fast one.

The Christmas Shopping Season of 2019 is expected to break sales records over Christmas 2018 online sales of US$765 Billion in the US and up to 12% according to the US National Retail Federation. In the US and the UK, the Christmas shopping season is the busiest shopping time of the year and accounts for as much as 30% of the total sales in the year for many retailers.

In a Google Webmaster Central Hangout last week (18th October 2019), a question was put to Google’s John Mueller. “Wondering if Google checks status codes before anything else, like before rendering content?” This is a great question to John – in very simple terms do Google care about the status code on your website? The answer is categorically yes. Google does indeed check the status code of a website page before indexing it, or rendering content.

What is Black Friday? The name originated in the US and it was given to the shopping day after Thanksgiving Day, which is the fourth Thursday in November with many Americans on holiday the following day. As most people are off work on the Friday following Thanksgiving, shops started cutting prices to entice customers just for one day and get the Christmas shopping season underway.