The Marketing Cost of Downtime - Wirehive · The Marketing Cost of Downtime 12 The perfect host On...

WirehiveThe Marketing Cost of Downtime

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The Marketing Cost of Downtime

Great brands are built on great experiences. We deliver them.wirehive.com

23-24 HERCULES WAYFARNBOROUGHHAMPSHIRE GU14 6UU

T 01252.560.565E [email protected]

Why brand owners need to care about the f inancial and reputational r isks of bad web hosting


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Contents

2 Contents

3 Introduction

5 When nines are a stitch in time

9 Buyer beware

12 The perfect host

13 Case studies

17 Conclusion

18 About Wirehive


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Introduction

Picture this: your favourite artist is performing a track live during a prime-time TV ad break to announce the immediate release of their long-awaited new album. You’re multi-screening, sitting at your laptop waiting for the ad break to finish. There’s bound to be a URL to visit.

Sure enough, the website pops up at the end of the song. Excited, you type it into the browser, and wait… and wait… After a couple of refreshes, you get an error notification. You decide to try again later, but the impetus is gone and checking out the website slips down your digital to-do list.

Now imagine that’s your customer trying to reach your website.


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The consequences of downtime - common parlance for the period when a website crashes and people can’t log on - can be disastrous. Lost sales and damaged brand reputation are just two of the effects of being offline. The problem is, not enough businesses pay attention to the infrastructure and support needed to ensure their end users experience an unbroken journey.

From coping with spikes of activity caused by marketing campaigns or breaking news, to set-up and service knowhow that will prevent your website falling over, there’s a cross-sector need for greater understanding of how hosting works and why it’s so vital. And it’s not just an IT issue: marketers need to care about the potential price of things going wrong.

In this report, we’ll examine the cost to UK brands of the dreaded downtime; consider some examples of hosting best practice and discuss what to look for in a partner.

This report sits alongside the Wirehive and Digital Doughnut guide - A Marketer’s Guide to Managed Hosting - from which the quotes contained here are taken.


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When nines are a stitch in time

If you haven’t previously been involved in the technicalities of a Service Level Agreement (SLA or hosting agreement) with a web hosting company, you may be surprised to learn that nine is a magic number.

Uptime - the total amount of time a website is live across a specified period - traditionally has its bar set at 99.9%, also known as a ‘three nines agreement’. This concept even has its own online calculator at https://uptime.is/. In essence, the 0.1% ‘allowed’ downtime equates to 43 minutes per month, or a shade under nine hours per year.

A risky business

That downtime amount might not seem a lot and, as such, appears to be perfectly acceptable to brand-side marketers. However, it can equate to approving hours of downtime, meaning potentially millions in lost revenue. Imagine if that chunk of downtime occurs on Black Friday or Boxing Day. Those key sales periods won’t return for another 12 months, and in the meantime, you’ve missed out on a big slice of income.

Although hosting clients are starting to get more of a handle on SLAs, they remain an issue. This is partly because - like any small print - the detail often goes unexplained, and the business can be unaware of the consequence of going along with a standard number of nines.

The client signing the contract needs a greater awareness of the risks - and cost - of not employing the best hosting solution on the market. According to Statista, total UK ecommerce revenues over the next five years are predicted to be £440,772bn. Considering the SLA standard 0.1% downtime, that equates to more than £440bn of sales revenue being risked during the same period. A not insignificant chunk of cash.


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Customer experience

Examining what the shopper thinks of downtime, we conducted a survey among 1,000 UK-based consumers in January 2017.

Altogether, 45% of respondents claimed they had been shut out of a website they were visiting to buy something during the week before they were polled. Furthermore, almost 10% said they had suffered a failed online journey between six and 10 times in that period. Meanwhile, there was an even higher figure relating to consumers trying to use the Web for research. The proportion reporting difficulty in reaching a site to check something out was 55% overall.


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Losing money is one obvious consequence of this amount of downtime. Another factor is brand damage. In today’s expectant, tech-driven consumer market, reputation is easily harmed by a lack of available information or the chance to transact. Of the people we interviewed, more than two thirds (just under 68%) agreed that their opinion of a brand would be negatively affected by downtime on its website. Interestingly, the total was slightly lower (57%) for people who said they might be put off buying from a brand in future because of downtime, suggesting respondents were more riled by inconvenience than not being able to spend their money.


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Marketing demands

Brand-side marketers are becoming more savvy about the cost of downtime. Heather Horton, Global Head of Digital and Communications at Karndean Designflooring, comments: “For us a mixture of factors are important including cost and security, but the most important is uptime and making sure you’re not working with a hosting company where you’re going to have any serious performance issues.”

There’s also a greater understanding about the fact that 0% downtime is nigh-on impossible, given the possibility of unexpected technical issues and human error. That said, many clients push for ‘four nines’ (99.99% uptime) or more. Fall below the required standard, and the hosting company should expect to reimburse a pre-agreed proportion of the monthly fee - potentially all of it - to the client.

Meanwhile, B2B or ‘brochure’ site owners often fall into the trap of thinking web hosting isn’t a concern for their business as it’s harder for them to quantify lost revenue. Not so. If organisations don’t sell products or services through a website it’s still business critical to make sure that site is fit for purpose, fully functional and secure.

There are two key lessons for website owners here. Firstly, you need a hosting services provider to minimise the risks to your business of things going wrong. Customers will clearly punish you otherwise. Secondly, when researching the best partner, you need to speak to a reputable business that will explain the detail of an SLA that will work best for your organisation. This should be considered alongside all the service aspects we’ll look at next.


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Buyer beware

In our view, up to 95% of websites are not fit for purpose. That might sound outrageous. Yet between unsophisticated understanding of how sites stay online, and less scrupulous hosting companies promising the Earth, it’s fair to say that a large proportion of brands’ digital assets are on platforms with an unacceptably high level of risk.

Many clients buy into hosting services in good faith. They expect their website to be watertight. Elsewhere, organisations have been guilty of not assigning ownership of hosting and it is overlooked until it’s too late.

As we’ve seen, the market is gradually catching on to hosting experts’ view of the world, but there are some headline things to consider as a ‘tick sheet’ when buying services.


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Weigh the cost

Conduct a cost benefit analysis to understand how much it’s worth investing to restrict downtime to an acceptable level (in other words, how many ‘nines’ do you need and can you afford?). A smaller organisation that initially feels zero downtime is appropriate might change its mind at the cost of perfection. Another which can quantify millions of pounds in ecommerce revenues might be more willing to protect that income with a higher hosting budget.

As Aqueduct CTO Guillaume Buat-Ménard points out: “Sometimes a client will ask for zero downtime. The question is whether they are prepared to pay. It comes down to how much they are prepared for the risk. What does it cost you to be down for two hours in terms of loss of traffic and revenue? If you tell them the cost up front, they will say ‘that’s a lot of money’, but happily spend that money to fix a problem further down the line.”

Scale to the peaks

It’s vital to ensure you choose a supplier that is set up for minimal loss of uptime, even during peak activity. Stephen Tolcher, Service Delivery Manager at Mando, states: “A lot of smaller hosting companies have pieced together a small data centre without being properly set up for the peaks and troughs of hosting.”

Get the tech right

Most marketers can’t be expected to know inside-out the intricacies of hosting technology. Yet with customer experience being rated as the primary way for organisations to differentiate themselves (source: Adobe 2017 Digital Trends Report) they need to be aware of the effect that poor technology and hosting support can have on sales and brand reputation.

In larger organisations, this will necessitate a genuine dialogue between the marketing and IT departments. Study after study shows how badly aligned these teams are. Marketers appear more conscious of brand reputation and customer experience than their IT counterparts. Publisher ClickZ recently found most IT respondents (88%) called infrastructure at their organisation ‘cutting-edge’ or ‘good’, compared to only 61% of marketing-focused respondents.


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Flexible partners

There are many other hygiene factors to consider ahead of signing on the dotted line:

Business pedigree: seek partners that bring a proven track record of working with credible brands, supported by case studies and testimonials

Security: There is no shortage of examples of brands which have suffered security breaches, such as Cloudflare’s problems in early 2017, illustrating the need to ensure that security is top of mind when selecting a hosting company Growing together: If your organisation is set to grow quickly, you’ll need a hosting partner that can scale alongside it to look after increasing traffic levels. Reliance on a single server that might unexpectedly fail isn’t an option. Aqueduct’s Buat-Ménard says: “When we choose a set-up it’s very rare to choose one server. Often, it’s a scalable solution on multiple servers in the Cloud and a load balancer which distributes the traffic between servers.”


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The perfect host

On paper, everything looks rosy in the web hosting garden. Any of the thousands of hosting companies in the UK could supply kit that they say will do the job on downtime.

In truth, success takes hard work, technical expertise and, as mawkish as it sounds, the human touch. It’s important to remember that an SLA is just a commercially backed agreement. Hosting only works well if it’s with a supplier that can back a solution technically as well as financially. This means brands having 24/7 managed support.

We all know how frustratingly inefficient - or at best impersonal - live chat or emails can be. A satisfactory resolution is much likelier if a service manager is always at the end of a phone, even if it’s the middle of the night. As AKQA’s Executive Technical Director, Regardt Meyer, says: “Communication can’t just be by email and chatbots. I want to be able to meet people and talk to them, it needs to be a bit more personal. The relationship needs to be high touch.”

No matter which sector your organisation belongs to, the same rules apply. Partner with a hosting supplier who’ll patiently discuss the nitty gritty of your requirements. Then, provide a bespoke, top-tier service alongside personalised and ongoing account management.

Here are the thoughts of two brands de-risking their online operations, simultaneously allowing end users to have a great online experience, through good hosting practice.


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CASE STUDY

House of Hackney

House of Hackney sells luxury interior products, including bespoke fabric, wallpaper and soft furnishings, through its website and Shoreditch store. Women aged 28 to 35 are responsible for a large proportion of its revenue, with females aged 35 to 50 the highest-converting online demographic.

The website is critical to the brand, as a shop window for the physical store, brochure for trade and wholesale customers, and for the ecommerce function. Some 40% of international sales also come through the site.

Since the brand launched in 2012, it has enjoyed growth in online sales of between 40% and 60% year on year. Targets for the next financial year are even more ambitious. Ecommerce manager Rachel Morris says: “One of the main reasons we wanted a hosting company was to safeguard future growth. We have around 50,000 monthly visitors online and this will grow, so it’s vital to have a hosting environment that can support growth, and give us 100% uptime and a fast website.”


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Black Friday and Christmas are key sales periods. House of Hackney aims to boost marketing activity around these occasions in 2017. “We ramp up our server hardware around these times. We don’t have an in-house function to oversee this so having Wirehive as a supplier is essential,” adds Morris.

Thus far, House of Hackney has been impressed with the smooth and speedy service provided by Wirehive. “The response to issues is quick,” explains Morris. “Sometimes, problems are solved before we were aware of them, for example if they happen overnight. If something goes wrong the team jumps on it quickly, including if it’s out of hours.”

Hosting ROI is difficult to measure in terms of positive return. It’s more a case of no results are good results, and lost revenue and reputational damage limited if downtime is minimal and problems solved rapidly.

Of business’s understanding about web hosting as a service, Morris concludes: “It’s an essential requirement. I do think most brands understand the need for hosting. Unfortunately, however, it’s often seen as a nerdy and dry subject, so it’s not always prioritised. For us, it’s about staying online, avoiding poor site performance and supporting our customer journeys.”


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CASE STUDY

Karndean DesignFlooring

Karndean Designflooring is a global luxury flooring brand, known for its high-quality products.

Wirehive was introduced to Karndean Designflooring through long-time agency partner LAB in 2014, when the company was looking to move to a more robust hosting solution. The brand wanted to unify its trade and domestic businesses onto one, better-structured platform with a fresh look and great user experience. Wirehive was hired as a partner to deliver a fast and functional site with reliable uptime.

Delivering a slick, sound operation with minimal downtime, within a defined budget, were the central considerations. Built on Sitecore, the site has high volumes of content, including large-scale images and an integrated blog.


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One of the main challenges that Wirehive had to overcome was specific requirements that need to be met when working on Sitecore. Although Karndean was already using Sitecore, it had not deployed the more advanced personalisation functionality using the ‘DMS’ feature, and wanted to upgrade to the new version of Sitecore which required the addition of ‘xDB’.

Working collaboratively with the teams at Karndean Designflooring and LAB, Wirehive re-designed the hosting environment, using its expertise as a certified Sitecore partner, quickly ensuring uptime was at an acceptable level and that a high quality of service was delivered. This improved performance, resolved existing issues and set up the site for continued growth. As efficiency was a key consideration for the project, all parties strove and succeeded in making technical requirements fit with commercial necessities.

Wirehive has continuously maintained above 99.9% SLA uptime, despite many serious technical issues that the team has had to contend with. Karndean’s customers are consistently treated to a user experience that matches the integrity and consistency of the brand’s overall image. Karndean Designflooring has since invested in increasing server capacity and added Incapsula to the network for DDoS protection, which will improve customer experience ongoing. The partnership continues to flourish.

Heather Horton, Global Head of Digital and Communications at Karndean Designflooring, comments: “The team at Wirehive are not only reliable, but also a pleasure to work with. Our new site delivers an excellent customer experience to a growing, more diverse audience in a way that reflects the quality of the brand. We know that we have the right hosting solution in place as our business - and traffic levels - continue to grow.”


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Conclusion

Consumers, and to an extent marketers, take domain hosting for granted. It’s easy to assume that enjoying an online browsing session or checking out at an ecommerce platform will be plain sailing.

But the marketing risks of downtime are real and shouldn’t be ignored. This report has highlighted how a broken online journey can ruin your brand’s reputation and, worse, dent your sales. It has also attempted to quantify the cost of being offline, which makes grim reading.

Solving downtime might seem like a simple concept. In reality, web development and hosting is a minefield for clients, with lots of suppliers willing to accept big fees for offering a basic service.

Business definitely cares more about hosting than it used to. That’s likely because of the advent of digital transformation and a sharper focus on security. More regular involvement of CIOs and the procurement team is also a factor.

We’re on a mission to make understanding the intricacies of hosting, and finding the right solution for your business, a marketing industry standard. Get it right and your customers will have a satisfying experience while your organisation saves money and face. In a digital world, this should be front of mind for all brand guardians. It’s time to change the way you think about website hosting.


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About Wirehive

We are Wirehive and we are going to change the way you think about web hosting.

We’re a hosting consultancy dedicated to the digital sector. We provide agencies and their brand clients with bespoke hosting services, engineered to suit their exact digital requirements.

From start-up to heritage, boutique to household name, Wirehive has been entrusted by countless marketing teams with the online presence of their brand.

To find out more about how The Marketing Cost of Downtime Report can help your brand deliver a superior online experience, get in touch:

Kevin MacDonald, [email protected]+44 (0)1252 560 267


19T 01252.560.565E [email protected]

WIREHIVE23-24 HERCULES WAYFARNBOROUGHHAMPSHIRE GU14 6UU

© Wirehive. 2017

This is an unpublished work the copyright in which vests in Wirehive Ltd. All rights re-served. The information contained herein is confidential and the property of Wirehive Ltd, and is supplied without liability for errors and omissions. No part may be repro-duced, disclosed or used except as authorised by contract or other written permission. The copyright and the foregoing restriction on reproduction and use extend to all media in which the information may be embodied.

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