One of most business owners and webmasters biggest nightmares is that their website will go down. The nightmare would be even bigger if your company is GoDaddy and your business housed millions of websites for clients. On Monday September 10th, GoDaddy experienced outages that not only took down many websites, but also took down GoDaddy associated E-mail accounts. The hacking group Anonymous initially claimed responsibility for the attack, but as of Tuesday, the company was saying that the problem occurred because of an Internet glitch caused by a corrupted router data table. No mater what the cause, it was a real headache for GoDaddy and for the businesses that this problem affected.
While some businesses are more dependent on the Internet than other businesses, websites and E-mail are still important to doing business in today’s economy. A 2004 article from entrepreneur.com still rings true today on why websites are so vital to business success, including:
– 89% of consumers now shop on-line
– A presence on the web is important so that customers, potential employees, business partners and perhaps even investors can quickly and easily find out more about your business and the products or services you have to offer
– Your site may be the first chance you have at making a good impression on a potential buyer
These facts especially ring true for small business. Unfortunately, small businesses were the hardest hit by Monday’s GoDaddy outage. Most of the 5 million websites that GoDaddy hosts belong to small businesses and some depend almost entirely on the Internet to make sales. According to an article by B2BWebsiteProfits.com, if a site has:
“22,000 unique views a day, a simple 5 to 15 minute outage means 76 to 229 individuals who may never come back to that website. An outage during peak times could mean losing thousands of visitors.”
The cost runs even higher if the business is engaged in paid search like Google Adwords or Facebook Advertising. Again from B2BWebsiteProfits.com concerning this paid traffic and outages:
“Not only will you lose the money on paid visitors, you’ll lose face with a partnership and the potential revenue those names bring to the table. Outages hurt future opportunities. That’s future opportunity lost beyond measure!
Here’s a quick and easy way to calculate simple costs of a website outage. It starts with knowing the number of leads generated, unique visitors gained, and profit/loss for period of measure.
– Determine Costs per Lead and Unique Visitor
– Determine NET Earnings per Lead and Unique
– Determine Leads and Unique Lost in Outage
– Know an Approximate Cost of Website Outage
At the current example conversion of unique visitor to lead, you’ve lost an average 1.9268 leads with 79 visitors. According to impressions per visitor you’ve lost 284.4 impressions. This assumes visitors are evenly distributed across your site in a 24-hour period.
Now simply multiple lost leads, visitors, and impressions against monetary factors. This will tell you costs and net earnings lost — worse, because during an outage your bounce rate is 100% your costs DOUBLE because you’ll need to pay to recapture these visitors.”
Hopefully, outages like the one that GoDaddy faced this week are few and far between. Unfortunately, no outage can be entirely avoided, no mater how big, reputable, and reliable the hosting company is that you chose to host your website.
Eric Wagner Marketing is the place to go for social media, Internet, and other technology related information to keep your business running in today’s Internet world.
Images: FreeDigitalPhotos.net
