Dec
22
2009

Reliability: The Holiday Season and Ecommerce trap – when downtime equals lost sales, and uptime equals lost revenues

Holiday shopping season is crunch time for many businesses dependent on the revenues generated between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. Increasingly, a large percentage of those sales are via online channels. IT infrastructure and availability is under the microscope, and lost sales from poor performing or offline servers compound an already high average Cost of Downtime (CoD). The question is: how can you accurately calculate those losses in order to responsibly protect your business. Understanding true downtime losses are the key to qualifying your availability requirements.

The tangible, obvious numbers are easy. Take the average daily sales total, multiply it by the percentage increase for seasonal holiday sales, multiply that number by hours or days of downtime, and you have a nice, easily understood price tag. It’s not the most accurate price tag however, and therein lays the danger. Intangible costs can ripple and escalate in unexpected and very expensive ways.

Let’s consider an imaginary SMB that sells a popular gadget. They have a shopping cart section of the website that moves 1,000 gadgets a day at a price of $10.00 per gadget.

1,000 gadgets X $10.00 = $10,000 per day in gross online revenue
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Sep
24
2009

Top 6 Reasons Web Design Agencies Select Windows Managed Hosting

Flexibility – With Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 – PHP and .NET both run equally as well. This comprehensive development and hosting environment enables Web design and development agencies implement custom and readily available frameworks and open source Web applications.

Easy Configuration – With AppCmd the new UI, plus centralized configuration, including delegation, Admins can now easily work with applicationhost.config and web.config files. IIS 7 now supports the flexibility and configuration needed to build complex, secure, and feature rich functionality. The new UI in IIS 7 makes it easier than ever to configure the Web server and Websites and applications on the server.

Performance – Optimized performance and resiliency. Several architectural improvements have been implemented in IIS 7 which enables better performance, throughput and in the case of PHP – outright seeped in execution.

Troubleshooting – With Failed Request Tracing administrators can peer into the web server and see detailed diagnostic information. With the Runtime Status & Control API (RSCA) administrators will be able to see what requests are executing in real-time.
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