Eliminating Downtime For Your E-commerce Store.

Running an e-commerce business isn't just about keeping your website up and running. Customers rely on your ability to serve them via telephone, fax, email, or other means, and it requires all of your systems to be working to be able to fulfill customer requests. Often, a single failure in your infrastructure can disable your ability to serve clients, ship orders, answer calls, and process transactions.

Calculating the cost of system downtime isn't just looking at the cost of lost orders. Your time as a manager, and the impact on your staff and clients need to be accounted for as well.. The labor cost of fixing customer service problems, and the opportunity costs of spending your time fixing your business (rather than growing it) all add to the core costs of lost orders.

The major points of failure, where your ability to service clients can be impacted, includes you website hosting, telephone systems, ISP access, email, core application software systems, and electrical power. A failure in any single one of these core infrastructure components can impact your ability to properly serve your customers.

Accessing the Internet from your business can often be the most critical potential failure points. Today's e-commerce business use the Internet to send or receive emails, receive orders from your storefront, and produce shipping labels. Typically, small e-commerce businesses rely on DSL or cable Internet services. There are inexpensive, high-performance wireless based back-up systems available for your business to use in the event of an outage of your primary Internet provider.

Setting up your network to access multiple ISP services is becoming easier, and less expensive. Low cost intelligent routers which monitor the ISP connections, and automatically route connectivity to the service that is "up" are easy to install, and will keep your business up and running when your primary high speed connection goes down.

Losing your telephone service is another major infrastructure risk. Both clients and vendors are unable to reach you if the phones are down. The new breed of Internet based toll free service providers can provide a creative, and inexpensive solution for back-up telephone services. These services allow you to program the routing of your inbound phone calls to your landline, mobile phone, VOIP phone, or a combination of them. Setting up your inbound calls to route to an alternate number (such as your cell phone) if there is no answer on your landline is easily done.

Since everything in today's e-commerce businesses are run with electricity, a power outage can bring your business to a halt. Installing basic UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) battery back-up systems on your equipment can give you 10 - 30 minutes of power in the event of a power outage. Keep in mind, its not just your PC that needs to keep running, but also phones, routers, modems, and network servers as well.

To manage longer-term power outages, a back-up electrical generator is a must have piece of equipment. Inexpensive units are available at the local home center. Have an electrician wire up a generator transfer switch to your circuit panel to assure you can safely and quickly switch over to generator power in an outage. Test your system from time to time to make sure the generator starts with ease, and that you can switch over your circuits without disrupting the business.

Most of us focus our energy on having a high availability host for our website and stores. The goal isn't just to make sure the site itself has high availability, but also all components that plug into the site. Make sure your payment processor's systems are equally high uptime for both the payment gateway, and the authorizing network.

Should you be unfortunate enough to suffer a true catastrophic failure of your systems, you will need a back up of your business records and data files to get back up and running. It is vital you back-up your systems including your local PC, and take copy of your files off-site to a secure location at least once a week.

It is important that you test all your redundant, and back up systems periodically to make sure they are working. There is nothing worse than having a critical system outage and then find out your back-up systems aren't working. Then you are attempting to fix TWO systems, not one. Keep the back-up and redundant systems operational when things are running well to make sure you can continue your business operations when a major outage occurs.

A carefully thought out set of investments in your infrastructure can make your life much less stressful, and can reap a good return on investment. An online store doing $500,000 in revenue per year risks over $100 per hour when business is incapacitated by a system outage. Only 1% of downtime per year can cost up to $3,000. When you consider that you may have ten critical systems, if each is 99.9% reliable, combined they are going to cost you 1%.

Article Source: http://www.search4allinfo.com

Edward Cole's Internet baby shower decoration store has shipped thousands of orders. Edward is writer and manager for at PartyPail.com, and he says that the Radio Flyer baby shower is one of the most popular themes.

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