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<seo title="What is downtime" metakeywords="downtime,site down time,server downtime" metadescription="what is downtime and how to prevent it" />
<div align=justify>Downtime is an annoying occurrence experienced by most website owners.  Downtime stands for the amount of time during which a website is inaccessible to users for various reasons. It is almost impossible to experience no downtime for every particular website. Understanding downtime and how it can be prevented is essential for success.

* '''''Possible reasons for downtime'''''

Generally, it is rather difficult to define the exact cause of downtime. However, there are several common reasons.  The first one is planned downtime by the web host (commonly used to perform numerous tasks such as server, hardware, or software upgrades).  Another cause is component failures such as viruses, file corruption, or programming errors.  User end errors (e.g. accidentally erasing files ) is another possible cause. 

* '''''The impact of Downtime'''''

Regardless of the sever downtime cause, its affects are usually significant.  The most obvious one is a loss of profits (e.g Amazon.com’s approximate two hour downtime in June 2007 resulted in an estimated $3.48 million loss).  Customers are getting annoyed and anxious when a website experiences downtime  Another negative impact here is the loss of interest from potential investors. Additionally, search engine rankings are also affected negatively in such cases.

* '''''Steps to prevent downtime'''''

Though downtime can’t always be predicted, there is a number of ways to prevent it. Consider the below steps:

* ''Purchase a monitoring system to ping websites on a regular schedule and send notifications of outages.''
* ''Backup data on regular basis''
* ''Use Google Webmaster tools''

* '''''Reporting Downtime'''''

Once your site goes down, try to find the cause of the outage. If you can’t do this, contact the web host’s technical support team.  Hosting providers aren’t always aware of outages, so it’s important to let them know as soon as possible about the outage.  Then you should send notifications to your customers for them to be aware of the issue. 

Now that you know how to deal with downtime issues, you can not worry about income and customers loss.
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