If you stop and compare a standard brick and mortar business with an online company you can get a feel for the complex challenges that both face. This is true if you think of the additional cost of managed Internet redundancy and the cost to physical retail business of buying a backup generator.
An online business uses the internet, provided by an ISP, to market their products, contact customers, post to social media and conduct online marketing programs. A brick and mortar business relies on power from the utilities to keep the lights on, the tills working, and the sales signs flashing. When either fails having a system in place to pick up the loss is critical.
While a brick and mortar store may be able to install a generator, an online company often doesn’t have any backup. However, that is only the case if they don’t have managed Internet redundancy build into their system.
What if….?
Not every business needs managed Internet redundancy. If you only sell one item every 24 hours or even every few hours you can probably risk your customers not hitting the exact time that your server is down for a few minutes. On the other hand, and if you are selling items that are big ticket purchases, one lost sale could be the difference between monthly profits and monthly losses.
The best way to determine if you need managed Internet redundancy is to ask yourself what if my ISP went down for an hour, two hours or more. What would I lose? How many customers would I miss? How many potential buyers couldn’t reach my site? What profit did I not realize during the outage?
The Option
The best option for most businesses of any size is to go for managed Internet redundancy. Keep in mind your don’t need to choose an equivalent ISP, you can choose a lower cost, lower benefits service that will still keep your e-commerce services and website up and functioning.
The good news is that if you also use a managed WAN optimization service you can bond the two, allowing you to get more than your typical service from your primary ISP by utilizing the bandwidth of the secondary ISP. In this way managed Internet redundancy is not just helping you out when you need it, but also helping your system all the time.
