Downtime-Whitepaper

Copyright 2013 IX Web Hosting

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Table of Contents

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What is Downtime?

Causes of Downtime

› Hardware Failure

› Human Error

› Software Failure

› Security Breach

› Natural Disasters

Why Downtime Costs Money

› Business Disruption

› Lost Revenue

› Lost Productivity

› Recovery

› Damage to Reputation

Web DWeb Developers and Downtime

Prevention Against Downtime

Common Responses to Downtime

› Reaching out to Consultants

› Upgrading the Hosting Plan

› Switching Web Hosts

The Best Hosting Options for Preventing Downtime

ShaShared Hosting vs. Cloud Hosting

Summary

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© 1999 - 2013 IX Web Hosting. All rights reserved 1

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Downtime is a disastrous situation for any business or organization. Even small companies can lose as much as $6,900/hr during downtime, and mid-sized organizations can lose up to $74,000/hr.

We put together this report to demonstrate how downtime can negatively affect businesses, and what types of hosting are best suited for preventing these types of outages.

This document will explore the causes of downtime, why it costs businesses money, who is at the greatest risk, and how downtime can be prevented.

Mid

-Size

s Business - $74,000/hr

Smal

l Bus

iness - $6,900/hr

DowntimeLoss

Foreword

What is Downtime?Downtime is something 97% of companies suffer from at least once a year. It is a word used to describe the state of unavailability experienced by websites, applications, and online services.

When a website is experiencing downtime, no contact information from the site can be obtained, no new members can sign up, and no online purchases can be made.

Similarly, when a business’s network or data center experiences downtime, employees can’t share data, access files, and sometimes, can’t even work at all.

For those97% that report

downtime, there isa hefty associated

cost.


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Causes of Downtime

According to the Quorum Disaster Recovery Report, Q1 2013, hardware failure is the number one cause of downtime for small to mid-sized businesses.

Old devices, unmonitored heat levels, and improper cleaning can all lead to a piece (or multiple pieces) of hardware breaking and bringing the server or system down. As such, hardware failures usually cause extended periods of downtime, and are exceedingly stressful to IT technicians, who are tasked with finding and replacing the faulty hardware as quickly as possible.

Even if these problems don’t cause downtime, they can still cause slowness and loading issues, which can be just as costly. A study in 2010 showed that 57% of online customers will only wait a mere 3 seconds or less before abandoning a website.

Overloads are difficult to deal with, because without procuring additional hardware or resources, bringing the website or service back online will yield the same problems, and, typically, resources such as these can’t be obtained on a moment’s notice.

It’s important to note that resource overloads and malicious overloads are not limited to hosting companies and servers. Personal computers are also large failure points for business productivity. Virtualization of the personal computer has been a response to downtime as a result of hardware failure because virtualization limits the number of hardware failure points (via personal computers) in a single business and outsources the responsibility of hardware management to companies who who can focus on uptime.

Hardware Failure

Hardware (and software) failure can also be caused by an overload. An overload occurs when a resource is maxed out. If a website gets a major spike in traffic, if a database receives too many connections, or if a hard drive runs out of storage space, an overload will occur.

ResourceOverload

Other times, a malicious party will direct a bunch of dummy connections to a server, eating up all the bandwidth and blocking anyone else from accessing it.

This type of bandwidth overload is called a DoS (Denial of Service) attack.

MaliciousOverload


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Causes of Downtime, Cont.

Human error is the second most common cause of downtime. If a worker installs a piece of hardware improperly, incorrectly applies a patch, or accidentally combines incompatible components can cause errors, slowness, lost data, and downtime.

Even if you’ve hired an experienced team, IT technicians come from a wide variety of backgrounds and educations, and while any given tech has a wealth of knowledge, there will always be a few things they may not be familiar with, or something they might not catch. Human error tends to arise from systems management departments such as System Administration, Network Administration, Security, and Development.SSetting up an IT network is a lot to manage, and there are several points of failure. Because of this, some companies would rather not deal with the hassle, and instead opt to outsource their IT needs to a company that handles their network and services for them.

Human Error

Software failures occur when a program fails, coding becomes corrupted, or a new patch causes an unexpected error. This accounts for approximately 18% of downtime incidents.

In MaIn March of 2011, an auditor from Idaho State found problems with a new Medicaid claims system that could have cost millions of dollars. Design defects in the claim handling process, along with a few other issues, resulted in payment delays and faulty claim processing. The state resorted to sending more than $100 million in advance payments to providers while figuring out what the problem was.was.

Quorum Disaster Recovery Report,Q1 2013

Software Failure


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Causes of Downtime, Cont.

Security breaches (sometimes referred to as ‘hacks’) can occur through old versions of CMS (ex. WordPress) or shopping cart software, coding injections, or database injections.

Unfortunately, some crashes or instances of downtime aren’t purely accidental. Security breaches consist of a foreign party, either human or automated, that breaks into a website or server and either injects malicious code or removes needed code in order to disable the site or service.

Security Breaches

5% of the time, an outage has nothing to with the website, software, or hardware. “For instance” in natural disaster area kind of amateurish, if the area that houses the servers is hit with a natural disaster, such as a tornado or earthquake, the building may lose power. No power means no server, which means no service.

NaNatural disasters aren’t a huge factor when planning for downtime, but they are a big enough risk that they shouldn’t be completely overlooked.

Even extreme natural disasters do not always equal downtime, however. Some web hosting companies have taken substantial failovers in place to handle unexpected power outages. Power generators and multiple data center locations are two things that make a large difference to the impact natural disasters can have on uptime.

Natural Disasters


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Why Downtime Costs Money

Computed from 41 benchmarked data centersAverage cost of unplanned data center outages for nine categories

If a business is using a site or service that they depend on, and that service fails, the business is essentially paralyzed until the issue is fixed. All interactions between customers and other businesses will cease, communications will be at a standstill, production will slow down or stop, and quotas will be missed. Lost wages, overtime, and remedial labor all add up during downtime. And, even after the issue is fixed, the business has to catch up, since they’ll be trying to recover lost time and sales.

A loss of monA loss of money due to business disruption may actually be a threat to the company as a whole. A study by The Via Group reported that 3 out of 5 businesses that experience a major IT outage will be completely out of business in 5 years.

These dramatic findings might have to do with a variety of factors:

Companies that are not technologically sophisticated tend to be those that experience major outages, and technological sophistication is related to longevity.

Companies that are not technologically prepared for downtime would tend to be unprepared for other risks related to emergency planning, disaster recovery, and business continuity. For example, a company not prepared for downtime may just as likely have limiting issues related to cash flow, IT knowledge, resource cross-training, succession planning, etc.

›

›

Business Disruption


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$ $40,000 $80,000 $120,000 $160,000 $200,000

The Ponemon Group, 2011

$179,827

$118,080

$96,226

$42,530

$22,347

$20,884

$9,537

$9,063

$7,008

Business disruptionLost revenue

End-user productivityIT productivity

DetectionRecovery

Ex-post activitiesEx-post activitiesEquipment costs

Third parties

Why Downtime Costs Money, Cont.

Retail websites are hit hard by downtime. If a website designed to sell a product experiences an outage, no purchases can be made. Even if a company doesn’t use their website to sell anything, when people can’t locate the website to check on hours, location, or get a phone number, the company is losing potential customers.

Lost Revenue

For companies that use a data center to run their day-to-day activities, downtime potentially means no incoming emails, no data sharing between employees, and no access to files needed for daily business functions. If a business uses virtual desktops to run their employees’ computers, and the server providing the desktop crashes, productivity grinds to a halt, and employees are essentially being paid to do nothing.

Lost Productivity

The core cause of the problem will also need to be fixed, which will cost money as well. Whether the problem is coding, patching, hardware repairs, or hardware replacement, rectifying the issue and making sure it doesn't happen again will require some funds.

A study by the Ponemon Institute shows what companies did in response to downtime. Each of these tasks takes time, resources, and manpower, all of which eventually translates into money. The %’s add up to more than 100 because some companies have to take more than one of these precautions:

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70%

60%

56%

51%

51%

26%

19%

13%

Repair IT or Infrastructure equipment

Replace IT or Infrastructure equipment

Contact equipment vendors for support

Purchase new IT or Infrastructure equipment

Hire outside experts to remediate the problem

Implement/Improve monitoring capabilities

Conduct a data center audit or assesmentConduct a data center audit or assesment

Recovery


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Why Downtime Costs Money, Cont.

News of a website’s downtime and perceived undependability can spread across blogs and social media, killing a business’s reputation and costing them customers. A report by Convergys showed that it actually only takes 1 negative tweet to lose about 30 customers.

Additionally, if Google happens to be indexing while a site is down, it can cost the business dearly. 404 - Not Found errors are what typically are displayed when a site is down, and they are one of the worst infractions when it comes to Google search rankings. Even dropping 1 or 2 positions in the rankings can cost a business visitors and potential sales.

This gThis graph from seochat.com shows the relation between Google rank and click through percentages. Notice that the click-throughs drop off very sharply as Google rank decreases:

[The yearly cost to companies that experience] both downtime and subsequent damage to their reputation can be substantial. On average, small businesses can lose $26k/yr, mid sized businesses can lose $881k/yr, and large businesses can lose $2.7 million/yr.

Damage to Reputation

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20

90%

80%

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%30%

20%

10%

0%

Correlation between Google Ranking Positionsand %CTR (Click Thru Rate)

Position in Google

y = 0.6993x

R = 0.52742

.12014

Averageposition CTR

1122222233333333444445555555566666677788899910

43%61%3%43%78%75%244%44%28%6%22%13%33%24%35%35%32%9%20%11%16%10%21%21%20%26%13%3%7%6%9%9%9%5%8%5%8%1%6%6%9%6%1%13%5%


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Web Developers and DowntimeWeb developers and designers have to be particularly wary of outages when picking a hosting plan and setting up their customers’ sites. Even if a developer isn’t hosting anything themselves, their clients will hold them responsible for their sites’ well-being.

If a web developer hosts all of their clients’ sites in one place, and the hosting service suffers downtime, so does every one of his/her clients. So, not only does the developer lose money and reputation, but their clients’ businesses may also be subject to losing in revenue, productivity, and reputation. It's a risk that can multiply quickly and must be carefully planned for.

Web dWeb developers who may try to solve this situation by hosting their customers across multiple web hosts will find such a solution to be not only expensive but extremely difficult to maintain. Not only that, but each additional web host can introduce additional points of failure as well.


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Prevention Against DowntimePreventing just one crash event can save a mid-sized company up to $250k/year. Given these numbers, preventing downtime should be one of the top priorities for any business. And, while there is no cure-all solution, there are a few factors can be considered that will drastically decrease the chances of experiencing an outage.

Resources need to be kept in check to prevent slowdowns and overloads. If a business notices that web traffic or the need for file storage is increasing, steps must be taken to make sure the hosting plan can handle it.

A business should actively mA business should actively measure web traffic and bandwidth usage and chart it to make intelligent predictions about trends and temporal fluctuations. And, a business should always have more space and bandwidth than they need so the site can handle spikes in web traffic.

1. Monitor ResourcesWEB TRAFFIC

Businesses should have their IT needs covered 24/7 to avoid any issue that occurs outside of the usual hours of operation. This staff will update software, maintain server firewalls, monitor for DoS attacks and hacker activity, and keep an eye on hardware. After an internal survey, IX Web Hosting has found that 7 people is the minimum needed for 24/7 coverage, but more should be considered to cover unexpected absences, sick time and vacation days.

2. Adequate Staffing


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Having a backup system in place to continue working when the primary system goes down is another line of defense. This is known as redundancy. Power supplies, hard drives, and bandwidth can all be redundant, and will allow sites and applications to function even during technical issues.

4. Redundancy

If resources are running low, it may take some time to increase them. During this time, a business’ website or services can experience slowness or go down altogether. In order to prevent this, a scalable hosting plan is the best option. That is, a plan that allows additional resources to be acquired as needed with minimum wait time.

5. Scalable Resources

Businesses should be open to asking experts for help, as well. Bringing in an outside perspective can often be more objective in observing those processes that go on day in, day out. Simply having a "system technician" on hand for day-to-day issues isn't enough to prevent or shorten the span of downtime incidents for serious businesses

3. Expert Assistance

Prevention Against Downtime, Cont.

Common Responses to Downtime

As we mentioned, it’s important that businesses be willing to seek an external perspective on how their business is run. In fact, approximately 71% of companies use third party experts for assistance in avoiding downtime.

Reaching out to Consultants

If a customer feels that their site is growing, and they want to make sure that they don’t expend all of their resources, sometimes they will upgrade to a more feature-rich plan with their web host. The issue with this approach is that it doesn’t always fix the problem. Sure, if you need more space, and an upgraded plan gives you more space, that’s fine. But if your site is getting slower because it’s getting more popular, a more expensive plan doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be getting more bandwidth or processing power. Essentially, throwing money at the problem isn’t a cure-all.

Upgrading the Hosting Plan

Customers dissatisfied with the speed and performance of their sites will often pack up and move to a different web host in search of higher quality hosting. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always work, as we explain below.

Switching Web Hosts


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The Best Hosting Options for Preventing Downtime

Many hosting customers who leave reviews for various hosting companies appear to believe that choosing the right host can limit their exposure to downtime. There is significant pressure put on the reputation of hosting companies to provide steady uptime and snappy service. Based on what’s been explored here, resources and staffing seem to be at the core of Downtime Prevention, but at the core of every hosting company is a fairly standard set of tools that allow them to deliver their service. There is not much variation in hardware, provisioning, software, or staffing amongst the top companies.

In the end, regardless of brand, shared hosting is pretty standard across the board. The bottom line is, if downtime prevention is at the top of your list of hosting requirements, the solution isn’t picking the right brand, but rather, picking the right type of hosting.

Are there brands that are better in the uptime department?

Web Hosting Hub

Web Hosting Pad

IX Web Hosting

Host Excellence

99.99% uptime

Inmotion Hosting

Fat Cow

99.95% uptime

99.27% uptime

99.94% uptime

99.36% uptime

98.52% uptime

99.17% uptime

99.39% uptime

99.53% uptime

97.33% uptime

3.88 wk. hours down

13.80 wk. hours down

1.56 wk. hours down

4.57 wk. hours down

4.00 wk. hours down

19.40 wk. hours down

3.80 wk. hours down

2.42 wk. hours down

1.08 wk. hours down

7.60 wk. hours down

Host Monster

Green Geeks

Just Host

Host Gator

Hosting Company Real Uptime Percent/Hours


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Shared Hosting vs. Cloud HostingBecause nearly all shared hosting products are essentially the same, tackling potential downtime issues requires selecting a type of hosting that is specifically designed to counter most, if not all possible downtime scenarios. For instance, this chart compares the features and downtime prevention measures of shared hosting and Cloud hosting:

Shared hosting is by far the most popular kind of hosting out there, but, it’s lacking in several significant areas that can lead to more downtime. Shared hosting’s biggest issue is that the resources (computing power, space, bandwidth, etc) are stretched between hundreds of customers. This leads to fluctuating performances and, at times, unstable service. Because a shared hosting machine houses many customers, they can affect each other depending on how many resources they use. It only takes one customer overloading the server to cause all other customers on that server to experience slowness and downtime.

BeBecause of this, business owners and organization leaders can’t risk hosting websites or basing resources on shared hosting accounts. Since there is no influence over what the other customers do, it’s too unpredictable when it comes to service levels and uptime. This is illustrated by the 99.999% uptime of Cloud vs the 99.9% uptime of Shared, for example. The difference between these numbers equates to a difference of about5 hours/year of downtime costs. Multiply that by the $6900/hr lost during downtime by just a smallbusiness, and the advantages of Cloud uptime start to stack up.

Cloud pCloud provides the scalability, redundancy, user control and resources that make it the number one choice for online businesses. In fact, the majority of top-of-their-industry businesses already use Cloud or some other kind of fault-tolerant servers for their critical applications.


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Scalable

Uptime

Redundant

Backups

Guarantee

Physical Resources

Yes

Up to 99.999%

Yes

Customer hasFull Control

Contracted ServiceLLevel Agreement

Dedicated

No

Up to 99.9% (Variable)

No

Not Guaranteed

StandardTerms of Service

ShaShared

Cloud Hosting Shared Hosting

SummaryDowntime should be treated as a major risk factor for any online business, and is something that should be taken into careful consideration when picking a hosting service, or hosting plan. While plans that guard against downtime may be more expensive at first, the dependability and peace of mind over the long run make the initial expense more than worth it.

Works Cited

Aberdeen Group - Four Steps to Setting the Right Budget for Downtime Prevention, April 2012http://www.stratus.com/~/media/Stratus/Files/Library/AnalystReports/Aberdeen-4-Steps-Budget-Downtime.pdf

Continuity Central - The Top Causes of Downtime Explored, February 11th, 2013http://www.continuitycentral.com/news06645.html

Quorum Disaster Recovery Report, Q1 2013http://wwhttp://www.inquirere.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/National-Survey-on-Data-Center-Outages.pdf

PhoCusWright Inc. (on behalf of Akamai Technologies, Inc.) - Consumer Response to Travel Site Performance, June 14th, 2010http://www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/2010/press_061410.html

PC World - 10 Biggest ERP Software Failures of 2011, Chris Kanaracus, IDG News Service, Dec 20, 2011http://www.pcworld.com/article/246647/10_biggest_erp_software_failures_of_2011.html

Emerson Network Power - Understanding the cost of Data Center Downtimehttp:/http://emersonnetworkpower.com/en-US/Brands/Liebert/Documents/White%20Papers/data-center-uptime_24661-R05-11.pdf

SEO Chat - Google Ranking Positions and %CTR: Estimating Search Engine Visitors, December 20, 2010http://www.seochat.com/c/a/google-optimization-help/google-ranking-positions-and-ctr-estimating-search-engine-visitors/

Web Hosting Watch - Best Web Hosting Services 2013, March 20th, 2013http://webhostingw.com/

StStratus Technologies - The Cost of Critical Application Failurehttp://go.stratus.com/l/3302/2012-07-10/2bcfrx?Ref=GOOGLEPPC&pi_ad_id=32341208256


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