Why Your Website or App Needs Uptime Tools

Tired of checking your website or app multiple times a day to make sure its working the way it should? Wouldn’t it be a relief if there were a service that monitored your application 24/7 and notified you the minute a disruption in uptime occurs?

If tech titans like Yahoo, Google, and Twitter can go down, you can just about guarantee that your application will experience downtime as well.

Uptime tools are becoming increasingly popular and are quickly becoming a must have for any business or organization that depends on a website or application (so just about every business with its doors still open).

Just to give you an idea, In this post were going to cover:

The importance of application availability
How common and expensive downtime is
Why uptime tools can help manage your reputation and help your breathe a bit easier
What to look for in quality uptime tools

Application Availability is More Important Than You Think

What are Common Causes of Downtime?

There are three things guaranteed in this life: death, taxes, and downtime. The heavyweights in the tech industry lose millions of dollars each and every minute they’re systems are down. They invest large sums of money annually in preventative measures, and yet, these applications still go down occasionally.

Any number of things can cause downtime such as; errors in code, hosting provider issues, some form of human error (most common), equipment failure, natural disasters, and malicious attacks.

The bottom line is; despite preventative measures and the reason for application downtime, its going to happen at some point or another.

Application Downtime is Alarmingly Costly

We’ve written a couple posts that detail the alarming cost of system downtime. At a glance – its costs the entire industry $26.5 billion dollars annually, it can cost up to $5,600 dollars per minute, and its been reported that a single downtime event on average, costs approximately $505,000 dollars.

Damage to Your Reputation

Aside from the physical cost, web browsers are notoriously impatient and unforgiving. All it takes is a few instances of downtime, without a status page or some form of downtime communication, and you may lose the loyalty of that user forever.

Aside from leaving your website or application when its down, they likely take their business or attention directly to your competitor. So what can be done to prevent these costs and reputation damage?

How Uptime Tools Can Help You Breathe Easier

Frequent Website Availability Check

How many times a day would you say you check your applications availability? Ten, maybe eleven? No matter how many times you check, it never feels like quite enough.

Uptime tools check availability up to one hundred times a day. It doesn’t matter how diligent you and your IT team are, checking your application one hundred times isn’t a reasonable thing to do.

When the application does experience downtime, you, and your users will immediately receive direct messages called incident updates. These incident updates…

Keep The End Users Informed with

How frustrating is it when you start up your favorite mobile app or check up on your favorite website, and it isn’t working properly?

While their isn’t much that can be done about the downtime itself, status pages and incident updates allow you to get the word out quickly and easily. Uptime.ly uptime tools have built in functionality that can turn a status page into a mini forum that integrates with Disqus so that end users can communicate directly with your team in an orderly fashion.

What to Look for In Quality Uptime Tools

Frequent Availability Checks

Quality uptime tools should check for availability multiple times a day so you can worry about clearing your overflowing email inbox and not about making sure your application is functioning the way it should.

Incident Alerts When Things Break

Incident updates inform subscribed end users and application administrators of changes in status. Each incident update is catered to the receiver, your administrators and IT team will get the system report and the details of the downtime, while end users will get a friendly branded message.

Customization Features

Incident updates, system reports,and status page’s aren’t exactly the most exciting thing in the world to the average person. Customization features to give your brand an image during the notification cycle. While this may not be the highest priority internally, you’ll want your public facing status page to be fully customizable with your slogan and logo.

Ease of Management

An administrative dashboard is meant to display the key performance indicators in a consumable, easy to interpret interface. Because there are varying levels of data that need to be seen, any quality uptime tool has built in features to define user permissions and manage accounts. The IT team can see the nitty gritty, the C level executives can view the key performance indicators quickly, and the end users can see whatever you decide is necessary.

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