When the internet goes down, it can often last for only a few seconds. With many broadband services supplied over telephone lines, this sort of outage will often occur due to some instability in the system. Typically, the service goes down, auto-resets at a more stable speed and then comes online once more. This can be irritating but hardly business-critical. However, if your service is down for a few hours – or even days – then it could spell disaster for your enterprise. What can business owners do to safeguard themselves from such eventualities? Read on to find out.
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Host Your Website Elsewhere
To begin with, most businesses now rely on their website not only to promote their brand and services but to take orders, handle sales enquiries, process service requests and much more besides. If you have your website hosted on your own server in your office, then you need to make sure it will be connected to the world 27/7. This can be a problem if there is a power outage, let alone when your broadband connection goes down. What you need is a third-party web hosting service that can guarantee connectivity. Choose a service provider which offers web hosting with confidence, ideally where your site will be run from multiple servers, thereby allowing for the continuation of the service even if one server were to fail. The importance of professional website hosting cannot be stressed enough in today’s digital commercial world.
Have a Second Router You Can Deploy
Sometimes businesses face internet connectivity issues not because the broadband goes down but because their own router has a problem. The router serves as the main device that connects your local area network (LAN) to the outside world. They can develop faults, overheat or even blow fuses. Therefore, when you have an emergency internet problem, one of the simplest ways to fault-find is to use a second router and see whether or not your service comes back up. Other things to try checking on your WiFi repeaters. Have some backups just in case yours develop a fault. Sometimes, network congestion or people who have hacked into your WiFi can cause congestion which causes the broadband connection to drop out. Consider changing your passwords if this is the case.
Call Your Key Clients
If you cannot receive emails, web portal requests or other internet-related information from your customers, then they will be in the dark. In some cases, they may mistakenly believe that you are deliberately ignoring them which can lead to severe dissatisfaction. Therefore, you should get on the front foot and let your most important clients know that you have a problem but are working to resolve it. This will mean doing things the old-fashioned way and phoning them. However, it is much better to take this proactive approach than to hope the internet service comes back up before they have noticed.
Conclusion
Other than investing in a second internet connection, such as a satellite broadband service, to provide a fail-safe should your main provider go down, business managers need to plan for occasional downtime. By taking proactive measures in preparedness, your business will be able to get through such tricky times unscathed.