How can you effectively reduce site downtime?

Many things come to mind, but here's a general checklist: 1) Understand current and previous downtimes. 2) Identify critical components (like database, 3rd party services, servers). 3) Implement redundancy for those critical components (could be as simple as backups & load balancing). 4) Monitor the site and make regular maintenance updates (ranging from infrastructure updates to library updates). 5) Work on best practices for scaling infrastructure (such as using CDN). 6) Implement preventives security measure for DDoS and cyber attacks. 7) Develop an incident response plan (like working on rulebook or documentation). 8) Develop routines to ensure all the points above and be on top of downtimes. It doesn't have to be that hard.

My experience is that downtime needs tend to increase as technology and architecture of business processes gets old in the context of the required evolution of business processes and related data needs for decision making. It is important to keep up with technology developments, in particular for IT corporate systems, develop a plan to address what emerged as foresight in terms of gaps due to business needs evolution, and a strategy to address the gaps or implement the plan, or combination of both.

To effectively reduce site downtime 1. Understand the business objective the site was designed to support or help achieve 2. Have a strategy for ensuring uptime 3. Employ the right vendor infrastructure and support 4. Employ the right technical architecture; like employing the use of a load balancer, multi-cloud distribution, 5. Ensure the right configuration is implemented 6. Ensure the site is updated when necessary 7. Continuously monitor the site

From a perspective that applies in any field, regardless of whether we are thinking about the workplace or personal life, the most important step is to understand what is happening, more precisely to understand the processes. So my recommendation is to start by defining and implementing a Process Framework as a priority. When we have a master process list and also the documented processes (especially the core processes/ the most important for a company), we can also think about solutions (I recommend the BPMN methodology for process flowcharts). In my experience, I have seen so many process improvements that impacted other processes due to the lack of a Process Architecture implemented and ultimately proved unimportant to the company.

Below guidelines will help : 1. Implement load balancing to distribute traffic across multiple servers. 2. Weekly backup of the websites and data during maintenance window. 3. Setup real-time alerts for specific error conditions or thresholds to quickly address the problem. 4. CDN’s distribute website content across multiple geographically dispersed servers which reduce the load on primary servers and enhance performance. 5. Prepared to scale up servers in the event of a traffic peak or unusual spike in traffic. 6. Setup an escalation process to quickly react to PRIORITY incidents and train team on incident management process. 7. Make sure to have nonproduction environments to thoroughly evaluate prior to pushing changes to production.

Reducing site downtime is crucial for ensuring a positive user experience and maintaining the functionality and credibility of your website. You can Choose a Reliable Hosting Provider, Regularly Monitor Your Website, Implement Load Balancing, Scheduled Maintenance, Use Content Delivery, Networks (CDNs), Regular Backups, Implement Redundancy, Security Measures, Test Updates and Changes, Use a Content Management System (CMS), Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Mitigation, Implement a Failover System, Documentation and Disaster Recovery Plan, Employee Training, Regularly Update and Patch Software and Communication with Users.

Google Lighthouse is the easiest and very useful instrument. It allows to access performance, accessability, best practices and SEO. It will give you the windows of approval and elements that slow down your web application. For mobile applications there are different instruments: Metricfire, ScoutAPM, AppDynamics etc.

1. Knowing your system -Recognising that No system is standalone & that within a system all subsystems have definite inter linkages . -Having a logical flow chart of your system , clearly showing the input and output of each subsystem, will help easier identification of the faulty section - for each subsection have a pre-tabulated list drawn up in consultation with the vendor of frequent occurring faults and their rectification process 2.Vendor Management - Having deliberate discussions with vendor along with own ground team to draw-up the SLA agreement . - The SLA agreement should have a clear time bound escalation matrix and penalty clauses , where ever there is financial hit occurring due to delay in restoration by the vendor

Use AI Tools! While reliable hosting services, backups, updates, and penetration testing form the bedrock of website uptime, those seeking a more in-depth approach can leverage AI tools and chatbots like ChatGPT, MS Edge, and Bard to delve deeper into their specific needs and issues. These tools can provide detailed answers and guidance on not only what to implement but also how to implement it effectively, going beyond the generality of basic recommendations. By utilizing AI-powered assistance, you can gain a more granular understanding of your website's uptime requirements and optimize your strategies accordingly.

With availability of trusted cloud providers in the form of Microsoft Azure and AWS it has become very easy to deploy and maintain web apps or websites. These providers provide built in redundancy and resiliency features in the form of LRS, ZRS or GZRS that are very useful when it comes to failing over to standby location at the time of outages.

Using a reliable hosting provider is essential for site uptime. You have to make sure that true 24x365 support is available, with service agents that can actually assist in resolving incidents at any given time. It is also very important to choose a service where you have access to an efficient, easy to use control panel, so that you can diagnose and troubleshoot most incidents easily, and reduce downtime.

Unfortunately, hosting provider is chosen at the moment of website development. And it's usually chosen by default. That's why I can't advise to rely on it as the essential part.

Backup site data - is the essential part for reactive measure. Because it's the way to reboot the database and roll back to the previous version if something happened wrong. Backup has to be done by service provider. Amazon S3 has embedded tools and is the most reliable instrument.

Backing up site data cannot be overemphasised, especially in the cloud. Backing it up offline is also crucial. Certain trusted tools can be used to scan a website and then download all it contents to one's local hard disk. You don't want to be in a place where, for example, you're hacked and ransomed but cannot recover your site data, losing valuable time and customers' trust in your ability to handle yourself.

While we always talk about testing it before deploying anything to production, it is of utmost importance that we drive a culture that includes testing as part of development lifecycle. Test Driven Development (TDD) and Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) are such methodologies. One also needs to encourage implementation of unit test cases so that one is sure of robustness of what is developed.

Testing is the essential part of software development cycle. It's risky and dangerous to deploy on production before testing on staging or in development (testing) environment. That's axiom.

Always have a Plan A, a Plan B, and Plan CDEFG. Once you have your plans together - don’t be shy to share best practices with your suppliers to make sure your providers has a Plan A, a Plan B and Plan CDEFG. We can learn so much from Toyota’s Just-In-Time inventory planning system and borrow similar concepts for achieving 99.9999% site availability.

Don't forget to identify when downtime has impact on the business. Its not always necesary to have zero downtime 24/7/365. Consider to have planned downtime when it is possible in order to do the needed maintanance in order to minimise downtime when it is needed.