The Beginners Guide To Dealing With Website Downtime

26 September 2019

According to recent research, the average website is down for about three hours per month as a result of downtime to web hosting servers. The 99.9% uptime guarantee and refund policies offered by most to hosting provider, won’t matter if you have lost traffic as a result of downtime. On average businesses can lose $10.6 million a year as a result of website downtime.

What Are The Major Causes Of Website Downtime?

Website downtime occur for reasons,some of them include:

Website code issues: poor programming can cause heavy loads on servers which leads to database error then eventually, makes the site unresponsive

Hacker attacks: a website can be brought down by attack from hackers in various ways – the server can be overloaded with DOS attacks, or malicious code is injected to steal security credentials – either way, the website owners are often forced to shut down the site in order to resolve the problem.

Data Centre issues: downtime can be caused by the hosting company itself. In this instance, uptime monitoring tools come in handy because they allow you to track the reliability of your web hosting company.

Increased traffic: increased traffic is probably one of the leading causes of website downtime. The only way to keep your site up and running even when there is a traffic surge is to engage the services of a reliable web hosting provider – a fully functional optimized website would be useless if your web host is unreliable.

How To Protect Your Website From Downtime

It’s been established, website downtime can negatively impact an online business bottom line, therefore it is important to have protective measures in place to safeguard your business. Some of these methods include:

DNS management: is a service that automatically reroutes traffic from the affected server to a secondary server.

Backup recovery: setting up a secondary hosting account with a different hosting provider on a different server is a great backup option, that makes it easy for you to get your website online if your primary server experiences downtime

CDN: this network will basically store and deliver all cached content from your website and will protect it, in the occurrence of any short time downtime.

The combination of DNS management, a content delivery network (CDN) and a backup host- backup listing will go a long way in protecting your website from experiencing short or long-term downtime.

How To Avoid Prolonged Downtime With A Great Website Recovery Plan

Website downtime is unavoidable -site updates, extreme weather or equipment upgrade can cause website downtime. A website recovery plan and backup are are important to keep unplanned downtime from adversely affecting your business. Before setting up a website backup and recovery plan, you would need to put up – website monitoring systems in place to track website uptime. These monitoring tools provide vital information regarding website performance and availability.

With these tools, you can create a different test (checks on your website), to accurately narrow down the root cause of the problem and take adequate steps to correct it. These checks have to be set up outside of the basic HTTPS check the include-checking against known databases of virus and malware sources, record changes to DNS records and so on.

Set up a downtime page

The best time to set up a downtime page is when you still have access to your website. It comes in handy when there unplanned downtime or planned downtime. This page informs your visitor that you are on top of the situation. Putting up a ‘service unavailable’ or a ‘website undergoing maintenance’ message on a page is a great way to keep credibility and show that you have control of the situation.

How To Handle Website Downtime

1. Confirm site downtime: before taking any major step, you need to verify that your website is really down – that is, make sure it isn’t a problem with your Internet connection or browser. To be extra certain, use a different computer to test out your website.

2. Find the cause: you should try to ascertain what caused the downtime -hardware issues, a programming error, expired domain or a DNS problem?

3. Get in touch with IT support: get in touch with the support of your web host and get assistance for the issue. if you choose a great web host, you should have ready support available.

4. Inform your website users about the downtime: it is imperative that your website visitors are not left in the dark. Put out messages on your social media account to keep your customers informed about what is going on and that your business is taking steps to address the problem. If it is a planned all downtime, it is good practice to send out a warning message detailing the date and time of site maintenance.

5. Check-in with IT: communicate regularly with IT and offer any information they may need regarding the web server or your website. You should also get an estimate of how long it would take for the problem to be solved.

6. Remain calm: this is tough to do but it is important to remember that website downtime can affect anyone and it is not the end of the world. Keeping calm is a great way to stay on top of the situation and resolve it quickly.

In Conclusion

A website is an integral part of a business’s online success. Because of the great number of website downtime, it is imperative that downtime is dealt with swiftly to avoid long-term repercussions -loss of clients loyalty, the revenue.

Thankfully, major search engine websites like Google have put measures in place to help website owners mitigate SEO ranking damage by providing a way out.

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Top cloud security controls you should be using

Most organizations use at least some form of cloud storage, yet security issues are still a top concern. Data loss and security breaches are always in the news, with some of the most high profile data breaches to happen in 2018 so far including those that occurred at Reddit, Timehop, and FedEx. What this shows us is that even large companies can make mistakes that seriously compromise the security of their data. A 2017 survey conducted by Clutch revealed that while confidence in cloud storage security is high among small businesses, most are not doing enough themselves to protect their cloud storage. After all, cloud security requires involvement from the user, as well as the provider. We go over some of the top cloud security controls your business should be using to help ensure your data is adequately protected. Why do you need cloud security control? Every day, sensitive information continues to fall into the wrong hands. That’s according to Breach Level Index, as of August 2018. While cloud computing can be great for businesses, providing several benefits such as cost savings and data portability, it does come with certain information security risks. To protect your business against vulnerabilities, you need to put specific controls and standards into place. That’s where cloud security controls come in. They help to address, evaluate, and implement cloud security. They can include the following types of controls. Deterrent: These serve as a warning to potential attackers, warning of possible adverse effects if they were to proceed in their attempt, thereby helping to deter unlawful access. Preventative: These controls strengthen the system against attacks, protecting and managing vulnerable parts of the storage. Corrective: These help to reduce the consequences of an attack, which typically involves limiting damage. This could take place during or after the incident occurs. Detective: These controls will identify or detect an attack, and then respond to the incident. If an attack is detected, the detective control will signal to the corrective and preventative controls in an attempt to minimize damage. Using different types of controls will help to limit and prevent potential damage when using cloud storage solutions. What seems to be the problem? What businesses need to understand is that you cannot rely on your provider to do all the hard work. The issue is not that the cloud environment itself is insecure, but that customers are failing to configure their networks, applications, and data accurately. For instance, let’s take a look at what went wrong with Timehop. On 7 July 2018, the company was affected by a significant data breach that included email addresses, names, dates of birth, and phone numbers being taken. What was the issue? A cloud account that didn’t have multi-factor authentication. For Reddit, although they had two-factor authentication in place, their SMS-based authentication was not as secure as it needed to be. As for FedEx, the problem traces back to Bongo International LLC, a company bought by FedEx back in 2014, which had been storing sensitive client data on an open Amazon S3 bucket. The data had been available for public access for several years, having been collected from 2009 to 2012. Data can be put at risk in many different ways, so it’s essential to have the proper controls in place from the start. Find out what you are responsible for Many cloud services will offer some level of security. What companies need to do is find out exactly what they are responsible for when it comes to securing the data that is uploaded to the cloud. Ignorance is no excuse. Speak to your provider and find out which cloud security controls you are responsible for and what services they offer. Whatever tools are at your availability, make sure you use them all. Ultimately, you are responsible for securing your data, so take advantage of any security tools at your disposal, then make sure you take care of the rest. Limit cloud access A good way to reduce risk is to limit who has access to the sensitive information you are storing. Public cloud storage resources, such as Amazon’s S3 bucket, should not allow external access. Leaving SSH open is another common mistake. You should only allow those who must use the data directly to carry out their job to have access to the data. You can grant temporary access on an as-needed basis to any additional employees. Make the most of the identity and access control tools used by most major cloud providers, so you always know who has access to your data. When granting access, you have the option to limit what data someone has permission to access. Delegate appropriate permissions as needed and remove or disable accounts if an employee leaves the company. Keep your data secure One of the most common mistakes that companies make is to leave data unencrypted. You want to be sure that even if all other security measures fail, you have at least encrypted your data as a last measure of protection. While some providers offer encryption, companies should still use their own encryption techniques alongside these. Your decryption keys should remain within the company so that you can maintain control over these at all times. Learn from past mistakes Even large companies make mistakes when it comes to cloud security. You cannot merely rely on your provider to handle all aspects of security. Users need to ensure they are using current cloud security controls to ensure their data remains secure. The good thing is that we can learn from others’ mistakes. You can take extra precautions and implement certain controls and standards to improve security. Just make sure you pay attention to what is happening in the world of cloud security and update standards and controls accordingly. Read Also : What You Are Paying For With A Virtual Data Room Top 10 Computer Security Mistakes

5 Core Pillars Of Cloud FinOps

The current dynamic business environment requires companies to take a structured, proactive approach to manage, monitoring and predicting their cloud service costs. Doing so will help them to meet their financial goals. Cloud FinOps is a cultural shift and operational framework that brings finance, business, and technology together to accelerate business value realization and drive financial accountability through the cloud. At its heart, cloud FinOps enables businesses to understand the challenges and complexities of cloud information technology (IT) financial management. The core purpose of cloud FinOps is to optimize the business value generated from cloud services. It involves various techniques, like free credits, least-priced services, negotiating costs, and more. 5 Core Pillars of Cloud FinOps You need to know the core principles of the cloud FinOps design to successfully implement it. These design principles help build a cost-conscious, self-governing culture while fostering business agility and financial accountability in the cloud. The following are some key pillars of Cloud FinOps: 1. Enablement and Accountability This principle focuses on creating lean or centralized cross-functional teams. These teams may include application owners, architecture, operations, finance, and engineering. Establishing these teams enhances governance and sets guidelines for managing cloud expenditure. 2. Cost Optimization This principle requires stakeholders to identify the main cost-optimization drivers in the cloud environment. It is a continuous, iterative process that offers a consistent solution to managing cloud usage most cost-effectively. The following are the three common optimization areas: Architecture Pricing Resource 3. Realization and Measurement This principle involves creating core key performance indicators (KPIs), and business-value metrics will be utilized to evaluate the success of the transformation. In most cases, customers begin with a series of cost-optimization metrics. Afterward, business value or unit economics measurements, like cost per customer served or transaction. 4. Forecasting and Planning Proper cloud estimates and planning require the company to fully understand its cost drivers, assign cloud expenditure, and benchmark efficiency. Doing so ensures minimal deviations between the actual and forecasted costs. 5. Accelerators and Tools As you would expect, cloud FinOps requires you to employ proper accelerators and relevant tools. Doing so ensures effective monitoring and management of cloud spending. These tools may include: Automation scripts that set budget alerts and account guardrails Reporting dashboard for tracking value and managing cloud spend Cost management tools for analyzing real-time cost and billing data. How Do Cloud FinOps Work? This operational framework involves a three-step lifecycle to ensure teams remain focused on and organized to deliver business value and attain financial accountability. These steps include: Informing Optimizing Operation 1. Informing This stage involves informing the company about all cloud-related costs. It happens by providing 100% visibility and assigning cloud costs to relevant business units. Here, the goal is to let every team understand their cloud spending. Also, it involves benchmarking against the company’s internal objectives, like budgets and forecasts. Companies can visualize areas they’re attaining business value and where they do not, helping them determine their progress. 2. Optimizing Once members know the organization’s goals, costs, and achieved business value, they proceed to optimize costs. This step involves providing recommendations and actionable insights to the different teams. Here, companies cut off unnecessary services that increase their cloud spending. Also, they automate rightsizing of different resources and maximize the utilization of the available resources. As a result, it significantly reduces cloud expenditure. 3. Operation Once all costs are optimized, it’s time to architect the cloud environment to achieve and maintain minimal cloud spending. The company creates governance policies that help attain technological, business, and financial goals. The primary objective here is to achieve measurable goals and continual improvement. 4 Benefits Of Cloud FinOps: Adopting cloud FinOps best processes and practices helps enterprises achieve various high-level benefits, such as: 1. Cost Efficiency Cloud FinOps enable you to attain cost efficiency thanks to advanced tools and accelerators. These tools help you identify areas of optimization, track and optimize cloud spending, and hold every team responsible, reducing unnecessary cloud costs. 2. Positive Cultural Shift By holding every cloud consumer responsible and making their data on cloud usage and spending available, cloud FinOps helps optimize cloud consumption. As a result, it helps create a beneficial culture for all cloud-consuming parties. 3. Reduces Uninformed Decisions Uninformed decisions can be extremely costly. Without proper tracking of cloud spending and resources, your company may be spending significant resources on the cloud. Fortunately, cloud FinOps products provide real-time granular reports and insights, helping leaders to: Get service-level cloud utilization Track underutilized or idle resources Compare the business cloud resource usage by time Figure out business areas that need more resources. With such data, leaders are aware of which areas need what resources. Also, they are informed about their decisions’ financial implications. 4. Unifies the Company’s Ecosystem Every company often has a frustrating, complex, and invisible culture split between finance, IT, and DevOps teams. Requests, approvals, and processes vary from department to department, though they aim to achieve a common goal. Also, technical terms and jargon may not be understood by other teams. What’s more, the finance team often loses control of cloud infrastructure procurement when the cloud engineering team steps into the process. How does Cloud FinOps help in this case? Well, cloud FinOps help every team stay updated about their cloud costs depending upon their responsibilities. For instance, while the finance team views the cost reports and data, the engineering team can access the processor usage information. As a result, it leads to streamlined, effective, and unified operations. Challenges Of FinOps Although cloud FinOps is a great approach, it has its shortcomings. Many teams end up experiencing barriers to attaining business value. Some key challenges include: Difficulty understanding cloud costs One cannot trade off creativity and innovation for low cloud costs The DevOps teams may not exhaustively understand the financial processes Final Thoughts The cloud FinOps framework can significantly transform your company in all aspects. This operational framework enables you to optimize your company’s financial wellness while driving business value. However, to achieve the best results, you need to adopt the best practices and understand the principles and dynamics of this approach. Read Also: Top cloud security controls you should be using Hosted Mail Service That Runs on the Cloud Oracle & The Cloud: A Dream Team

Technological Evolution: How it Made Life Easier

Since a long time ago man has always made efforts towards making life more comfortable. With time, technology has advanced continuously and ironically; all these efforts have been towards developing the technology to make the jobs less tiresome. Most people use modern technology in many different daily activities, and every advancement in technology means a much more comfortable life for us. How has technology evolution made life easier for us? 1. Communication has been made easier : If you have ever posted a letter or a card or a letter to someone, then you understand why everyone should be happy to be able to communicate with anyone at any part of this world in a matter of seconds. During the era of letters, the recipient had to wait for days, weeks or even months before receiving the letter. Nowadays, people use emails and text messages to share information and text messages to their friends, relatives, and colleagues. Sharing photos has never been as easy as it is now since you can take them using a digital camera, upload the images using your laptop, and send them via email to any person anywhere and they will receive the photo in a matter of seconds. There are many Coola Prylar (cool gadgets) that are available in the market like phones, tablets computers that have made communication easier every day. With the advancements in technology, these gadgets are becoming more available in the market and cheaper every day. 2. Up-to-date World Events : There are so many events taking place all over the world, and it is very crucial for one to get updated at all times about everything that is happening all over the world. With technology advancements from the press to TV news and currently smartphones and the internet, you can get updates from all over the world from any location. 3. Traveling has been made easier : Nowadays traveling to new places is not as challenging as it used to be. You can find routes through online maps, book flights using your phone or laptop, you can call a cab just by using your smartphone, and best of all you do not need to hire a translator when traveling to places that people do not speak your language! All you can do is download a translator software and you are well set. You do not have to worry about getting hotels when you travel to new places as for most of them you can book them online. 4. Learning has never been easier! Since people started using the internet, there is limitless knowledge online and all you need to do is search for anything or anyone on the search engines and you will get your answer. You can get all the information that you need for your assignments on the internet. With institutions including online classes in their system, you can study a course from any part of the world without having to go to the classrooms. 5. Businesses are growing due to technological advancements : The advancement in technology has had a significant impact on businesses all over the world. It is now easy to advertise products, and reach even more customers around the globe by posting them on social media or creating a website among many other methods of advertising products. It is also much more fun to engage with customers since you can reach them quickly and communicate with them more conveniently. Technology evolution has made our lives easier in many different ways. On a daily basis, people come up with new tools and gadgets that help us to carry out our daily activities in a much more convenient and enjoyable way. We can always look forward to a much more advanced technology in the future which means even a much more comfortable life.

The Beginners Guide To Dealing With Website Downtime

What Are The Major Causes Of Website Downtime?

How To Protect Your Website From Downtime