Before we start off about why hosting downtime is bad for your website, let us establish what downtime is. Hosting downtime is defined as the time a website or web page is unavailable for access or usage. Hosting downtime, without a doubt, is one of the worst things that
could happen to your web site.
The repercussions of hosting downtime include:
Rating with Search Engines
Search engines like Yahoo and Google take downtime into consideration while ranking the sites on their results page. And even though downtime does not hit the user as hard today as it would do previously due Google’s constant web page caching that saves your site each time it is down, it does not mean it is not bad news. If your web site is facing considerable down time, the search engines interpret this as a sign that your web site is not reliable and/ or that you’re not focusing on the web page.
And in their endeavor to provide the user with relevant search results, your website starts shifting lower among the website rankings and stops showing up on the top of the results page.
Traffic spike loss
While your site may be maintaining a constant flow, the deciding factor that changes the traffic statistics in reality is traffic spiking. Every now and then a tiny ripple sets off and your site gets temporarily a little more popular drawing in all the traffic. Facing downtime during the spike will reduce the flow and make a public spectacle of your site when everyone on the spike interprets the hosting downtime as a sign of incompetency.
Public Perception
If it happens once, there is a chance that it will happen again. The good and bad thing about this is that people believe in it. So the moment a user encounters an error message that tells him your host is down, you are losing credibility in the public eye- which is the exact opposite of the intention with which you put up the site in the first place.
User Inconvenience
In case your web site is dependent on dynamic multi user interaction, hosting downtime is probably your worst nightmare. Apart from the obvious fact that hosting down time will directly bring the purpose of your site to a stand still, the long term implications of this would be loss of users and thereby, traffic.
