It’s not surprising when it does happen.  There are customers who are upset.  There are investors who are upset.  There are engineers and admins feverishly working at all hours of the day and night.  Servers are quiet.  It’s an eerie moment that those who work in this situation don’t like to have happen very often.  Unless you’re a consultant who receives a wad of cash every time it happens.

Website outages can and are often survived with minor injuries.  Most customers will forgive and forget when they are given their access back to their precious daily activities and are assured everything remains safe.

What is surprising is the lack of preparation many companies have for disasters.  Some don’t even know what disaster recovery is.  Being able to cope with an outage within an hour and be back online with at least some functionality if not all is as important as making sure the income is still coming in.  It doesn’t take long for a customer to browse elsewhere.

Today Netflix had an outage for about 12 hours.  This supposedly delayed their shipments for a day.  Customers won’t be seeing their movies for another day.  At this time, there is no word on the cause.  A minor hiccup, but one that could have repercussions.

Having another server available to display a message to your customers is a first step.  Letting them know there’s a tiny problem and that you know about and are working on it helps comfort those who are nervous of the effects of not reaching the site they intend.

If you have a website that is even remotely mission critical, research and devise a backup plan.  It may not be worth the time and cost, but there shouldn’t be very many people who want to take the chance if given a choice.  You want to not know there could have been an outage rather than have one and all your customers staring at you.