What Is Web Application Uptime?
Generally speaking, it’s a good idea to maximize web application uptime. Uptime just means the amount of time the web application is up and running for users to be able to use and tinker with. If a web application is ever down, therefore losing uptime, it is possible that your business may not generate as many sales as would be ideal. By losing uptime, you’re losing customers. It’s a simple equation.
Generally expressed as a percentage, it is a good indication of how much time your web application is running. Generally speaking, we expect 99% or more uptime and as little unplanned downtime possible.
What Constitutes Web Application Uptime?
Since uptime is given as a percentage, two variables are involved in its equation.
- The total time period.
Let’s say the total time period for which we’re calculating uptime is the entire day. That makes for 24 hours, 1440 minutes, or 86,400 seconds in total.
- Total time the web application was up
Now, let’s assume our website goes down for a couple of hours on any given day. Two hours means 120 minutes means 7,200 seconds. Take this number away from the total time period and you have the time the web application was up and running in seconds. This gives us 79,200 seconds for which the web application was in uptime.
So, the percentage is calculated by taking the ratio between 86,400 seconds, which, if you remember, was the total time period, and 79,200, which was the time the web application was up, and multiplying it by hundred.
79,200/86,400*100=91.7
91.7% would then be considered our web application’s uptime. Now, whether or not this is good enough is a topic for a different discussion. For our purposes, we can use this number.
Web Application Uptime Factors
Think about all the factors that make anything go wrong and put it into the equation for what can make a web application go down. Endless factors affect web application uptime. Here’s a short list:
- Power outages
- Server error
- Domain name expiration
- Natural disasters
- Broken code
- An outdated hosting plan that no longer caters to your site’s bandwidth
- Traffic spike (Black Friday deals, anyone?)
- Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks
- Human error
With so many factors affecting the availability of your web application, it’s a bit hard for us to aim for 100% uptime. Therefore, 99.9% is the general consensus, with 99.99% being the ratio to die for.
What Can Uptime Do For Me?
Of course, keeping a lookout for web application uptime doesn’t give you the whole picture. There may be limited functionality, or some functions may not be working at all, but if a web application is up on the web then this counts as uptime. Some companies would even go so far as to measure the time they spend on maintenance as uptime. This makes for bad results.
However, giving a number to the picture helps in generally being there for the users. If users see that a web application is wholeheartedly available to them, this affects the amount of trust they have in your application in a positive way. Besides, the more uptime a web application has, the impact this has on sales, customer satisfaction and customer retention.
Not only does uptime have a positive impact on customers on the front end, but it also keeps developers on the backend more productive and motivated.
A lack of uptime, or downtime, can bring you the following losses:
- Loss of customers
- A loss of productivity
- Damage to your site’s brand and reputation
- Additional costs to get your site back online
How Do I Maximize Profits & Minimize Losses with Web Application Uptime?
The answer to this question depends on a number of factors. What do you see as the biggest challenge in maintaining a solid uptime percentage? Viruses? Power outages? Maintenance times?
Here are some of the ways you can expect to challenge virus or malware attacks:
- Firewalls
- Two-factor authentication
- Reinforced DDoS protection
- Virus scanning and removal
One more factor is being able to fully optimize your web application by pulling in new softwares, updating databases, and keeping a check on the health of the servers. This helps keep malicious attacks out of the question. Older versions of the application are generally more susceptible to attacks.
If traffic is an issue, and you expect your web application to be loaded from time to time, and you face the threat of it crashing from too much load, there are strategies you can use to maximize uptime in those situations as well.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
CDNs can help streamline the processes for your web application by using cache to store important user information. This means the next time a user visits your web application, the web application doesn’t have to ping the server again. The CDN will store data on the cache and the web application can simply pull the information from there. This also helps spread the load a little bit since your data will no longer be centralized. If data isn’t centralized, it’ll help load your web application faster across different countries. Cloud-hosting is also an option here, which might end up saving you some money in the long run as well.
Get a Proper Hosting plan
Traffic spikes may be a general result of shorter bandwidth. If you’re able to, then it’ll be worth it to invest in a more solid and wholesome bandwidth package to help with large amounts of load on your web application.
Server issues may also play a role in your web application’s uptime. It may be helpful, if your server is acting out of wits, to invest in a different host. These hosts will generally give you a broad idea of how much uptime their servers can offer. This boils down the search for one by a significant degree.
What Does Monitoring Uptime Really Do?
Each of the web application uptime monitoring tools available on the market have prescribed functions they perform to keep a check on the uptime of a web application.
Some of these may be more complex than others, but generally, they offer similar services. These include, but are not limited to, key-word checks, SSL, Ping and Port monitoring etc. A usual web application uptime monitoring tool will check to see if the website is up and running every few seconds, and from different locations, to check and see if there’s uniformity in the service.
Errors, if found, are usually displayed on a status page, and results from the monitoring tool’s performance can be analyzed against a history of uptime. Being able to see a history of uptime gives you the opportunity to chart trends and study them to see what makes your web application run optimally and what makes it falter. Critical business transactions may be recorded and performed from different locations to see the web application’s activity.
Most of the tools available in the market will allow you to check the web application’s uptime from different locations, and some will go so far as to check its speed and give you reports on its functionality.
Some of these tools are available for free, some offer free trials before they charge a certain amount in subscription fee, and some even offer demos for you to get accustomed to the software before you buy it.
Web Application Monitoring Is Essential for Business Success
The benefits of having your web application performing with optimal uptime are endless. Uptime monitoring is an automated process that has the power to run every second, minute, or hour, 24 hours a day and seven days a week. Little is needed to maintain it, since it runs on scripted programs that are already held in place.
These are simple to use tools that can have a large impact on your business. These tools also allow you to test from different locations, giving you peace of mind that your web application is up and running in different parts of the world.
However, there may be some drawbacks as well. Some of these uptime monitoring tools may not be able to give you the exact reason why downtime happened. This may cause problems to linger in the long-run if you’re not well-equipped to solve them. A different type of monitoring, called Application Performance Monitoring (APM), is used to determine what faults there are with the performance of the web application.
Again, uptime is just the time the web application is up and running. It doesn’t account for minor faults and issues that affect user-experience.
