September 11, 2012

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The popular Web-hosting and domain-registration company, GoDaddy confirmed that the websites and e-mail addresses it hosts for small businesses were seeing outages Monday, triggering concerns it fell victim to a hacker attack, according to USA Today reports.

“‘We are experiencing problems,” wrote CEO Scott Wagner on its website. “We understand this is impacting some customers, and we take this situation very seriously. Everyone at GoDaddy.com is working to restore all sites affected by this outage as soon as possible.” The company tweeted later that it’s “making progress” and “some service has already been restored.’”

Small business owners impacted by the outages may find solace in the fact that they aren’t alone when these types of incidents occur, but knowing how to navigate a setback of this nature is paramount.

If your company exists as an online pure play or relies heavily on online sales to drive revenue, a website outage is equivalent to a nuclear meltdown and could very likely incite chaos.

Because for a brief moment, time stops your pulse starts to race and your business world appears to come crashing down. It’s unavoidable yet the very thought of it makes you cringe. For a split second you realize that you simply weren’t prepared.

How to Manage a Technology Crisis in Business

Online sales are the very lifeline of many companies.As Internet adoption rates increase and e-tailing soars “online shoppers in the United States will spend $327 billion in 2016, up 45% from $226 billion this year and 62% from $202 billion in 2011,” according to Forrester Research Inc. projections. Therefore a few minutes, hours or even days of website outages could result in significant losses.

While web outages are generally out of your company’s control, there are specific things you and your team can do to mitigate loss and proactively prepare for downtime in the future.

Here are five steps small business owners can take if a website outage occurs.

1.Make sure your site is actually down.

Take a deep breath and check to make sure your site is actually down. “Visit the website yourself, and press Shift + Refresh to make sure you’re not seeing a cached version (hold down Shift while reloading or refreshing the page) … You will need to check the website on your mobile phone or phone a friend. To be doubly sure, ask your friend to check Where’s It Up? or Down for Everyone or Just Me?, which will confirm whether your website is down just for you or for everyone.”

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