Results 1 to 5 of 5
  1. #1
    casionmark is offline Private Member
    Join Date
    November 2016
    Posts
    448
    Thanks
    341
    Thanked 127 Times in 94 Posts

    Default Site Downtime and impact on traffic

    Hi -

    Yesterday one of my sites was down for 8 to 9 hours due to an issue on the hosting side. That is an unacceptable level of downtime for me, but it is the first significant (maybe only) incident of that nature in a year. I just wondered from other people's experience what a reasonable level of expectation is from your hosting company - do they all experience some downtime, or is 8 to 9 hours in one day once a year totally off the scale?

    Also, does anyone know the likely impact on rankings? Would one outage like that impact traffic? I feel I've taken a bit of a hit today, possibly as google has lost a bit of confidence in that site.

    Thanks for any advice, comments.

    Mark

  2. #2
    sweetbet's Avatar
    sweetbet is offline Public Member
    Join Date
    November 2012
    Posts
    2,825
    Blog Entries
    5
    Thanks
    898
    Thanked 1,573 Times in 1,086 Posts

    Default

    My main site has never experienced such a lengthy downtime, but surely, Google must understand that sometimes sites do go down and become unavailable for one reason or another. If the downtime occurs on a regular basis, then I'd be concerned, but if it's a rare occurrence, then I wouldn't be too worried to be honest.

  3. The Following User Says Thank You to sweetbet For This Useful Post:

    casionmark (19 March 2019)

  4. #3
    nwalker's Avatar
    nwalker is offline Private Member
    Join Date
    June 2013
    Location
    England
    Posts
    592
    Thanks
    189
    Thanked 430 Times in 255 Posts

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by casionmark View Post
    Hi -

    Yesterday one of my sites was down for 8 to 9 hours due to an issue on the hosting side. That is an unacceptable level of downtime for me, but it is the first significant (maybe only) incident of that nature in a year. I just wondered from other people's experience what a reasonable level of expectation is from your hosting company - do they all experience some downtime, or is 8 to 9 hours in one day once a year totally off the scale?

    Also, does anyone know the likely impact on rankings? Would one outage like that impact traffic? I feel I've taken a bit of a hit today, possibly as google has lost a bit of confidence in that site.

    Thanks for any advice, comments.

    Mark
    It really depends on the availability service you've purchased from your hosting company. Service availability or uptime is normally determined by the level of resilience that's been built into the infrastructure. You pay more for a service that has high availability built in.

    The norm is generally something called three Nines i.e 99.9% availability. This normally translates to 8.77 Hours of downtime a year.

    For every .9 you add to availability the cost escalates massively. For example 99.99% gives 52.6 minutes downtime a year, the cost could be tripled.

    I think the emergency services in the UK has a redundancy level of 6 9's 99.9999% for their telephone systems which equates to 31 seconds downtime.

    Of course schedule maintenance is excluded from the calculations at the lower end of the scale, as there are limited opportunities to switch to alternative redundant equipment to keep services running.

    There is so many components that make up the infrastructure that your website sits on. Resilience can be built in along the whole chain, so there are no single points of failure. Alternative equipment can either be sitting on a shelf ready to be used and swapped out if there is a failure, or installed inline so when a failure occurs it fails cleanly over to the spare. (normally called Hot Standby)

    Having downtime all in one hit is a pain, but you get what you pay for. If this is unacceptable to you and you can equate the downtime with financial loss to you, you can easily determine whether it's worth upgrading to a higher level of resilience.

    Just as an aside - If this is your main source of income, do you have a Business Continuity plan in place? Could you recover your servers and website if the hosting company went out of business tomorrow? Something to think about if you can't.

    Sorry can't help on the Google bit
    www.livecasinocomparer.com - Find and compare the best online Live Casinos

  5. The Following 3 Users Say Thank You to nwalker For This Useful Post:

    -Shay- (19 March 2019), casionmark (19 March 2019), Strider1973 (19 March 2019)

  6. #4
    Sherlock's Avatar
    Sherlock is offline Public Member
    Join Date
    December 2013
    Location
    WC
    Posts
    4,656
    Thanks
    1,356
    Thanked 3,611 Times in 2,035 Posts

    Default

    It will not affect you in SERP.
    If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.

  7. #5
    casionmark is offline Private Member
    Join Date
    November 2016
    Posts
    448
    Thanks
    341
    Thanked 127 Times in 94 Posts

    Default

    Interesting, thanks. Sounds like 8 to 9 hours in one day is a lot then. I think there was more this morning too. I'll do more research. Re: continuity - I fully back up the site very regularly if thats what you mean. Thanks.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •