SMEs at risk from web downtime
Thousands of SMEs could be putting their business at risk due to web downtime because they haven’t negotiated a Service Level Agreement with their Internet service provider (ISP).
Following a recent outage at Demon, during which customers had no web hosting for more than five days, Lumison has issued five top tips to help SMEs minimise the risks of web downtime when choosing a web hosting service. Over 80% of SMEs are now online, and increased dependence on web hosting services for a growing range of mission-critical business applications means they’re particularly vulnerable to web downtime, according to Lumison CEO Aydin Kurt-Eli.
“The Demon outage highlights the importance of choosing the right service package from your ISP. Many customers won’t have realised until last week that their hosting was being provided without a Service Level Agreement. While most simple web hosting is provided on a ‘best-effort’ basis, customers have to decide whether five days of downtime constitutes a good-enough service,” explains Kurt-Eli.
He adds: “SMEs need to understand that while it’s almost impossible to guarantee 100% uptime, the right service agreement can help minimise the risks of downtime. This is why it’s so important for customers to understand the risks and rewards associated with their hosted service package.”
1. Ensure the right technology is in place.
While it’s almost impossible to guarantee 100% uptime, there are two simple questions you should ask your provider to ensure you have access to the best technology and so experience as little downtime as possible:
i. Ask your provider how it maintains its servers. It should have scheduled server downtime when the operating systems are upgraded.
ii. Ask if its system has a load-balanced infrastructure. The answer should be yes, with content switches, multiple servers and clustering so that individual server failures have minimum impact.
2. Choose a service that meets your business needs.
Getting the right service from your ISP is crucial. It really is a case of you get what you pay for. For example, a low-cost virtual hosting service won’t normally include an SLA, so it may be worth considering a dedicated hosting solution that will provide dedicated 24/7 support as part of the SLA. If your ISP is hosting just your website, you may be able to tolerate your website being down for a day or two. However, if you also rely on your Internet connection for sales and access to essential systems, any downtime will cost money, in which case you need an ISP that takes an outage as seriously as you do.
3. Get a service wrapper.
Technology and systems do go wrong. The question is what will your ISP do when it does? As such, getting the right service wrapper is essential. You need to ensure your ISP has the right customer and technical support services so it can be as responsive as you need it to be. Find out how long its takes your provider to answer your call when you have a problem and ascertain if it will put you through to a call centre or straight through to an expert engineer. At Lumison, we have a 24/7, manned, fully qualified technical support centre with an average call-response time of six seconds.
4. Check out references and stats.
Don’t be afraid to ask for references and statistics. Of course, your ISP is going to tell you it has very little downtime and a fantastic service, so check out existing customers and ask them what they think the service is like. It’s also interesting to find out about customer churn, as a good ISP should have low churn.
5. Be prepared.
Downtime does happen, so you need to be prepared. All SMEs should have a simple plan in place to deal with outages. Again, this comes down to whether your ISP will work with you to fix hardware or network problems within a fixed period of time, or offer compensation if it can’t.
Find out its definition of downtime: it should start when the service goes down, rather than when the customer reports a problem. Finally, make sure you clarify that breach of SLA is breach of contract and so allows you to move (at no cost) to another ISP.
Labels: business-broadband, lumison-broadband
