Imagine driving down to the local electronics retailer to buy that home theater system you’ve had your eye on. You arrive, only to find the doors locked and the lights out, even though you are clearly there during its regular business hours.
Would you stand around and wait to see if they unlock the doors? Probably not. You might return home with a lesser opinion of the store, or simply take your business elsewhere.
Most businesses don’t lock up during business hours, even for short periods of time — yet if your Web site is down, you’ve done the equivalent of bolting the doors. To make matters worse, your host may not be giving you the clearest picture of how well your site is performing.
“When your site is down, it can dramatically affect your revenue stream,” says Robert Garrity, vice president of sales and service for RedAlert.com, which monitors Web site performance. “It affects them in two ways: They can lose revenue or potential revenue, and they also lose some of the marketing image they want to portray to their customers.
“If they can’t get in, or can’t put in their credit card information to purchase an item, the customers tend to go away fairly quickly.”
On the Internet, it’s also extremely easy to simply head for a competitor’s site — and you may lose the customer for good.
“It’s a tremendous advantage to have an e-commerce solution, but it can be detrimental if it is not presented well,” says Garrity. “There is no good time to be down, even if it’s two in the morning, particularly for international time zones.”
Most hosts or ISPs provide some sort of monitoring. The problem is, most of it is focused internally, and may not be giving an accurate view from the customer’s perspective.
“Most do a good job of internal monitoring, but it’s difficult for them to know how they look from the outside world,” says Garrity. “They also don’t have the economic incentive to tell people they were down for awhile.”
Garrity says that recent figures show that 7 percent of the time, forms submitted to a Web site don’t go through for one reason or another.
RedAlert monitors whether the site is up, as well as if the correct pages are loading. If a form is being rejected, or another error occurs, the owner will be contacted immediately via cell phone, e-mail or pager.
“It isn’t size that determines whether you need to have someone monitor your site, it’s more related to how important it is to you to have your site up and running,” says Garrity. “We have clients that range in size from very small PC shops all the way up to Microsoft.”
The service starts at $19.95 per month, and is scaled based on the number of devices you have. Statistics are provided which indicate how well your site is performing compared to the Internet in general. This is also a good way to monitor how well your host or ISP is performing.
“Customers are starting to have a lot lower tolerance for sites that go down,” says Garrity. “They are not waiting as long. They want them up and running, and if they’re not, they’ll try the competitors.”
How to reach: Robert Garrity, [email protected]; www.redalert.com
Todd Shryock ([email protected]) is SBN’s special reports editor.
