Calculating the cost of downtime

Downtime is the bane of internet businesses the world over, causing havoc and wreaking disruption as it impinges upon customers and staff alike. When a business' hardware goes down, it inevitably causes disruption. One study estimates that by 2008 the annual cost of website downtime will be £2.7billion for UK firms. But downtime does not just affect businesses on a monetary basis. The use to which a business puts its servers affects the degree of disturbance downtime causes. For website-reliant ecommerce enterprises, sales completely cease at the point of downtime. In companies where online databases are essential for work to be undertaken, productivity is hindered. In conclusion, without reliable failover or planning, downtime invariably causes a business' profits to be reduced.

Table of Contents

• Contents
• 1 - What is downtime?
• 2 - How does downtime affect business?
• Customers seek services from elsewhere
• Your brand image is compromised
• You lose a critical information channel
• 3 - What causes downtime?
• Not enough bandwidth
• Bandwidth peaks
• Bandwidth on a shared solution
• Wrong solution
• Disaster
• 4 - How to prevent downtime?
• Load balancing
• Clustering
• Replication
• 5 - Conclusion

Size : 64 KB