Is Your Website Available 24/7?

One of the main benefits of outsourcing your web hosting is for availability reasons.

Sure, you may have your own web hosting equipment - web server, firewall, high speed internet connection etc. You may also have the necessary skills for hosting your own website. But do you have the inclination to be available to bring your website back online at any hour of the day?

If you host your own website, what would you do in the following scenarios:

• You're at the beach on a Sunday afternoon, relaxing with your partner. Suddenly your pager goes off indicating that your website is down.
• You've just arrived at the supermarket (after waiting in traffic for half an hour). You're about to go shopping. Suddenly your beeper goes off.
• You've decided to take a well-earned break. You're currently on a 3 day bush walk through the beautiful southern alps in New Zealand. Then... your beeper goes off!

And, all of the above scenarios assume that you have a reliable website monitor set up. If you didn't have monitoring, you wouldn't know that your website went down... until you were able to get online and check your website.

If you take your website seriously, then you should be serious about web hosting. I wrote about website availability in my web hosting tutorial. This includes some of the things that can impact the availability of your website.

If you don't already use an external hosting provider, I encourage you to consider it. Hosting is so cheap these days.

Can you afford not to have someone looking after your website 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year?