Online Business And Web Hosting Outages
What do you do when your web hosting provider has an outage that you are unaware of? Well since this just happen to me today I'm still thinking about how I can prevent this in the future (failover). I tried a live chat with the support desk and didn't receive a chat response but I did get an email which stated that my website loaded fine. They even sent me a screenshot of my website to show that it launched with no issue. It is very disconcerting for a newbie like myself (over 1 year in the game) to experience hosting downtime that is totally out of my control.
Here is how I found out, I logged into Google this morning to check my indexed pages and Adsence earnings. While in the webmaster tools under sitemaps I noticed that no pages where indexed, then I looked at the dashboard and all sites needed to be verified... [reason: server timeout.] Prolonged website downtime for me means that the hundreds of articles I've posted with links back to my home page and pages within my website will not work. This could lead to me having to resubmit the articles after the website comes back up. So far I've not received any emails from article directories stating that my links don't work so I'll keep my fingers crossed.
I tried to bring up my URL and it timed out, I tried to log into my hosts control panel and it timed out. So I did a Google search on the hosts control panel IP and found a hit on WebHostingTalk.com and somebody said the host had been down for 6 hours.
I checked the hosts forum and didn't find anything regarding the outage. I also checked their support update blog and the last entry dated 2/27/08 was regarding their phone support outage. Nothing on the page indicated they had an server or router outage.
So, I kept refreshing the Control Panel URL and it started to load, then I opened a separate tab (in IE 7) and the home page for one of my sites came up. So I went over to Google and revivified my websites (I already had the meta tag on the homepages so it was a simple process).
Although I am a Network and Systems Admin by trade I don't have any experience with web servers or hosting (which is why I outsource). But what I do know is that if this was a server outage then failover to another server is doable (clustering) according to precisioneffect.com/features/. But, I'm willing to bet if this occurred as a result of a router failure there may not be a failover option. I sent a reply to my hosts support this morning to see if they have any logs that an outage occurred.
For the record, I have been very happy with the service I receive from my hosting provider although Ive found others who have not been so happy. I currently run 4 websites so maybe I havent out grown them yet.
I suggest to anyone running an Online Business using a hosting provider to carefully go over their failover options in case of an outage, read their forums and support pages so you know when scheduled maintenance or anything else may affect you. Also, shop around and compare companies to your needs and maybe get references of others who outsource and run a similar number of websites.
For the additional online business tips and opportunities visit ServicesAreUs.com.
Related Articles:
Web Hosting Services
After finishing your wonderful webpages, the next step would be to register for a domain name. And when you have that as well, you have to get those web pages hosted as a website in a public web server the internet recognizes. There are at least 5 different web hosting services available out there. Understanding each one can get you to use the right one that suits your budget and needs.
ABI Hosting Announces Launch of Private Label Web Hosting
ABI Hosting is now offering private label web hosting to all businesses that want to begin providing web related services to their customers.
Web Hosting for Joomla
Building a web site takes a great deal of work, we all know that. From design to HTML/PHP/ASP/JS coding, it is all time consuming which affects our income directly. Designing custom headers, image objects, animations using utilities such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver, After Effects, Cold Fusion, are all time intensive tasks indeed.
Sell Web Hosting for Fun and Profit
The market is good for new Web hosting companies.
According to Forrester Research, there is now "positive — if modest — growth for Web hosting and managed IT services, at both the enterprise and SMB levels.
Top 6 Ways to Promote Your Web Hosting Business Part 1
Promoting a new company in the crowded industry of web hosting today is really hard. There are many tactics that work well and are legitimate, and you can use them to promote your company using them.
How Much Bandwidth Is Enough? --web Hosting Bandwidth
Bandwidth in its simplest terms refers to the monetary worth of break that flows across a leak wire in a inured moment period. For eminently lacework hosting providers, that space duration is measured in a month. Web hosting providers are worked up a certain amount per month or per year for an allocated amount of bandwidth from backbone providers and wholesale data centers. That cost is then passed on to the consumer in the form of web hosting plans.
WestHost Launches New Personal and Business Web Hosting Plans
- Bundled features and applications make the difference -
Affordable Web Hosting ? Not Just about the Price
When you hear the phrase affordable web hosting, what do you envision? Because if you think that an affordable web hosting plan is all about price, you would be dead wrong. It is all about the total package and the value you get for your money. Practically any web hosting company can tell you they are the most affordable and flash a pretty price tag, but unless they have more to back it up, in the long run, you are just not getting affordability.
Business Web Hosting: Which is Right for You?
Business web hosting is what you need. You have a website you need to put online.
The other side of a free web hosting plan
Mostly, new people get attracted towards the concept of free web hosting plan. However, they dont know about the actual issues involved in a free web hosting plan, until they use it. One must understand that a paid web host provider has got better services to offer, compared to free hosts. Free web hosting facility might be suitable for personal homepages and other types of websites which do not depend on online advertising or sales revenues. A paid hosting service is ideal for those in business and who are interested in online selling or just want to have a professional web presence with regard to their business.