When your website is "down" it's about as good as not having a site at all. There are no visitors coming in and certainly no revenue. In fact, the high costs and potential loss from your website going down can dramatically affect your bottom line. Because of this, most organizations seek to outsource their colocation needs. It is extremely important to choose a data center that will protect your critical data and documents from risk or disaster and guarantee that they will never go down.

A number of data centers are now guaranteeing "100% Uptime" in their advertising and marketing materials. The purpose of this article is to help you define the concept of the 100% uptime guarantee and how it applies to your online business.

The 100% Uptime Guarantee Explained
An uptime guarantee refers to the amount of time that a data center can certify that their systems are active and available to clients. The most reliable sites will guarantee 99.9% to 100% uptime in their Service Level Agreements. Anything less than that can spell trouble - downtime and lower availability.

There are, however, data centers that only promise 99.5% uptime. A data center that can only guarantee 99.5% uptime may experience up to 216 minutes of downtime each month. That's more than 3 1/2 hours! Consider this: if your site was hosted at this data center, would that downtime hurt your business? How many visitors may have tried to come to your site during that time? What's the average revenue your company could have made? 216 minutes can seem like a lifetime when your site is down and that can definitely affect your bottom line.

On the other hand, there are data centers that can guarantee uptime from 99.9% up to 100%. If your site was hosted at a site that guaranteed 99.999% uptime, your website may only experience 26 seconds of downtime in a month and that is a considerable difference.

The most reliable data centers offer complete coverage by guaranteeing 100% uptime that includes power, space, network access and internet bandwidth in their Service Level Agreements. Some colocation sites even notify all of their clients if the guarantees were not met and compensate them for it automatically. That is the best uptime guarantee you can get!

Several key components that can affect uptime include infrastructure, power, back-up power, cooling, security and safety. Best-in-class data centers can guarantee 100% uptime because they use carrier-grade or better infrastructure to deliver their services. They use state-of-the-art equipment in their facilities and protect it with technologically advanced security systems. Remove any of these components and the data center can become unreliable and clients will experience significant downtime that could lead to disaster for your online business.

When searching for an outsourced data center solution, look for the 100% uptime guarantee. You deserve the confidence that your IT infrastructure will be secure and available 24/7/365.

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About the Author

This article was written by leading CIO, Fred Mapp, and is sponsored by i/o Data Centers - a completely integrated data center services firm. We design, build and operate best-in-class outsourced colocation facilities. Let our team of experienced data center professionals assist you with your needs. To get more information about the 100% uptime guarantee, please visit: The 100% Uptime Guarantee.