If you've ever suffered from downtime on your website, you know that it can negatively impact your business' health. However, it is possible to avoid it with server maintenance.
There are entrepreneurs who do not pay much attention to the need for an efficient technological infrastructure, which can lead to many problems, including frequent crashes on the company's website.
To help you avoid this kind of adversity, we've designed this article to show you how server maintenance is critical to your business. Follow up!
What is downtime and what are its consequences?
When a process, system or operating activity goes down, this downtime is known as downtime.
This type of outage can be planned, such as when the IT team is doing an upgrade or maintenance; or unplanned, when some unexpected problem occurs.
So, these downtimes that happen suddenly that can harm your business, as the IT area was not prepared for it.
Because they cause losses, these events must be avoided at all costs. In fact, did you know that downtime is capable of causing a loss of approximately $5,000 per minute for a company?
That is, every hour, the business loses $300,000. No entrepreneur wants that, right?
So let's say your site is down for a few hours. This can jeopardize an entire day at work, as the consequences of this event are:
- unproductive employees as well as the services provided, as they are unable to work while downtime is taking place;
- loss of credibility among both new and old users of the site;
- decreased revenue during downtime as the site cannot operate;
- loss of the position achieved in Google's ranking, as it uses as one of its ranking criteria the speed that the site takes to load pages.
Your website crash can happen for different reasons, such as expired domain, errors in website programming, DDos attack – when several “zombie” computers access your page in a short time – and an unstable server.
In the latter case, this means that the site may be performing poorly because the server is unstable.
Therefore, it is necessary to be always careful to check if the uptime (which is the server's uptime) is above 90%, which is the ideal number.
This way, by constantly maintaining servers, you can ensure that your website does not suffer from crashes due to an unstable server.
How can servers be maintained?
A server works like a computer that is always connected to the network, whose purpose is to feed the site with content. Therefore, it needs to have an IP (Internet Protocol) address.
There are different types of servers, such as dedicated (a server only yours), shared (shared with other people), VPS (mix of dedicated and shared) and cloud (servers are located on different computers).
But no matter what type of server you use in your company, know that it is important to maintain it to avoid problems such as downtime.
To perform this action, understand that it is necessary to monitor preventively, identifying errors, events, intrusions and conditions that could lead to system downtime.
This makes it possible for cases that can bring losses and delays to the projects to be avoided.
Thus, server maintenance must be done periodically. For this, it is worth relying on software, such as Hosts Green, which offer facilities for this service. See below some of its advantages:
- enables the database to be constantly monitored;
- issues notifications of your website's downtime via email, WhatsApp, Telegram and SMS;
- schedule scheduled maintenance with custom alerts;
- creates visual availability report via a timeline;
- allows monitoring to be scheduled for the day and time you need;
- in addition to monitoring servers, it also monitors links with fixed and dynamic IPs, URLs and web applications.
So, you can count on a support that offers personalized services according to your server and your needs.
This software can be placed on your server in order to find faults, generating corrective measures that can, for example, block access, warn of possible intrusions and restart a certain service.
What are the advantages of maintaining servers?
In addition to preventing downtime, server maintenance has other advantages. Check out what they are below!
Prevents data loss and hardware failures
When a company doesn't maintain servers as they should, it's possible that critical data is lost and hardware fails.
This ends up reducing productivity rates and, consequently, your company's ability to deal with market demands.
Prevent malware attacks
By leaving your servers exposed, without proper protection, they become susceptible to malware attacks.
With this, the exposure of data from customers and business partners, in addition to internal information, is able to occur.
Balances your business' market share
Due to the negative consequences mentioned above, servers that are not maintained can affect the participation of your business in the field of activity.
This can happen both because of the loss of consumer confidence and also because of low productivity rates.
Avoid negative financial impacts
As well as downtimes, malware attacks, hardware failures and low productivity can negatively affect your business, especially in relation to finances.
This is capable of causing a decrease in your company's competitiveness, as the quality indexes are reduced, directly impacting revenue.
In this way, maintenance helps your company not suffer from damage that could be easily avoided if preventive rather than corrective actions were taken.
As you can see, server maintenance is very useful for several reasons, especially to prevent your website from crashing. But if that happens, don't worry. Read: Website down? No panic! We help you!
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