If you own or run a small business, one of the most important factors you must always keep in mind is how consistent your hardware is. In order to maintain a great work environment and happy customers, your hardware needs to be consistently stable with 100% uptime. Any less than that and you could be losing thousands of dollars a month. Let’s look at some other reasons as to why this is so important, and highlight some ways to keep your hardware consistent.
Uptime
First, let’s consider the importance of keeping your website up and running without any interruptions in its accessibility. Any business that owns a website and sells a product knows that every visitor to your website is a potential customer. Because of this, it is extremely important that your website stays up 100% of the time.
How do you manage this? You can do this by hosting your website on its own server. One of the best ways to go about doing this is by hosting your business’s website on what is known as a virtual private server (VPS). With a VPS, you control every aspect of your server, are normally guaranteed 100% uptime, and have a representative that is only a phone call away that can handle any problems you may have. This way, if your website suddenly gets a surge of visitors from a popular blog post or mention of TV, you are prepared and ready for it. If it dies from the large amount of traffic, you’re losing out on thousands of dollars in revenue.
Speed
Besides making sure that your website is up at all times, it also needs to be able to load quickly. Quick load times can also be accomplished by hosting your website on a VPS. The industry standard for load times is about 3 seconds, and if your website’s load time is outside of this limit your customers are going to notice it. Speed is one of the biggest factors in determining the conversion rate of a product or offer on a website. If the speed of your website takes even a second longer than your competitor’s site, you’re taking the risk of losing potential business.
Hardware
Even if you don’t own a website, your office’s hardware needs to be efficient and working 100% of the time. Whether you have a network that your system runs off of for handling customer support or you have a server that hosts the billing information of your thousands of customers, it cannot afford to fail.
To manage these types of problems and prevent them from happening, your main solution is to keep an IT leader on staff at all times along with a support team. That way, if any major problems do happen, you’re not scrambling on the phone to call the local technician to come your way and then having to wait an hour or two for them to arrive. By having an in-house IT team, all of your hardware problems can be taken care of quickly and efficiently.
Conclusion
As we have discussed, maintaining and being consistent with your hardware is one of the most important priorities for any modern business. Hardware failure can be the difference between a record-setting day of revenue and lost customers. By taking the necessary steps to ensure that your hardware is up and running at all times, you can ensure happy customers and a well-run business.
Jennifer Carrigan knows your small business needs everything it can to get up and running. For advertisement purposes, she recommends custom magnets to bring your online presence offline.