This statement applies particularly strongly to online businesses who take payments through their website. As a business, you want customers to come to your website and be able to purchase what they want. When your payment processor has 100% uptime, this shouldn’t be a concern – however, should your website or payment processor have downtime, every minute is lost sales and customers.

Here we come back to the saying – time is money.

Does your business have any redundancy or fail over systems to prevent lost revenue in the event of downtime? If not, it may be worth it to invest in adequate systems as well as a top-tier payment processor.

Let’s take a look at some data to demonstrate why your business needs to invest in better systems and redundancies.

The industry Uptime average is 99.9% - whilst initially impressive, the 0.1% of downtime translates into 43 minutes per month. For smaller businesses this may be justifiable as hours could pass between transactions – however, for businesses that handle many transactions a minute, 43 minutes of downtime can be thousands of dollars lost in revenue.

If we look at Amazon in 2013, the entire site was down for just under 40 minutes – this downtime cost Amazon an estimated $5,000,000 – equating to nearly $2000 every second!

Obviously, this is an extreme example – yet it still shows that even the most established of sites still run into issues.

Place yourself in the shoes of a concert promoter - think about the loss in revenue your business would incur if it wasn’t able to complete transactions on the opening day of ticket sales!

Downtime and Security

Payment processors and websites that take payments deal with very sensitive information by nature. If your business's payment processor is consistently having unexplained downtime, this could indicate a wider problem with their security measures.

As a business, it is your job to protect your customers details so if you are worried about security and downtime then it’s important to consider common cyber security issues that are correlated with excessive downtime.

• SQL Injection attacks
• DDoS attacks
• Software Bugs

Understanding your processor’s security protocols is a crucial part of effective business management – knowing how your customer’s data is stored is incredibly important and being able to identify a lapse in security can increase your business’s ability to manage sensitive customer data.

payFURL – Uptime, All the time!

payFURL was designed from the ground up to be a dependable service. To date, we have not had a single outage on the platform. Running on Amazon Web Services, payFURL has maximised reliability and resilience. Hosting on AWS provides us with the opportunity to scale along with demand at the touch of a finger – feel safe and secure whilst using payFURL for your business.