The Impact Of A 14 Day Downtime On Your Website And Domain Registered With Net4India

Net4's Name Servers have gone down on 28th April 2021 and are not back online to date (11 May 2021).

ICANN has identified the Gaining Registrar within the 2 weeks time (14 Days) as promised. Supposing everything goes according to schedule, and the domains are transferred instantly after 14 days, will things be back to normal with your domain and website after a 14 day downtime ? Let's explore.

Downtime impacts different businesses differently, but say for example if Google, Amazon registered their domains with the same Registrar as you and suffered similar downtime, this is an approximation of how much they would have lost:

Google had a revenue of 180 odd Billion Dollars in 2020

180 Billion divided by 366 Days ~= 0.5 Billion Dollars a Day ~= 3750 Crore Rupees a Day

For 14 days = 3750 Crores x 14 Days ~= 50,000 Crores

Amazon had a revenue of 386 odd Billion Dollars in 2020

386 Billion divided by 366 Days ~= 1 Billion Dollars a Day ~= 7500 Crore Rupees a Day

For 14 days = 7500 Crores x 14 Days ~= 1,00,000 Crores

Those are magnificent numbers, aren't they. Unfortunately, they are not clients of Net4, else, they would have bought out the entire company with pocket change instead of suffering the downtime and saved others as well.

But what about the average website ? Is the downtime worth calculating at all ? As a matter of fact, IT IS.

It's not just the loss of revenue that needs to be considered, since most of the websites don't generate any direct revenue at all. But, it is the loss of reputation and ranking that will hurt worse.

 

Reputation

A study done by Akamai found that 9% of the visitors who saw a website down would never return to visit it.

Another study by a shopping portal in UK measured that close to 50% of users would not have confidence to purchase from a website that was offline during a visit.

Now, how hard it's hit your reputation depends upon how lucky you were to not have any key customers visit your website during downtime.

 

Search Rank, SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and GoogleBot

Even if you were lucky enough to evade getting your reputation hit, this one will hit the search rank for sure, since the visitor is a BOT... GoogleBot :)

GoogleBot will visit your website depending on the "Change Frequency" value mentioned in the sitemap.xml file in order to index your website. It submits the results to Google Engine which does the job of ranking websites for specific keywords.

But, what happens when a website is down when GoogleBot visits it ? Well, the bot would visit back again and again intermittently to see if the website has come online and this will happen later:

According to a study, a 6 hour downtime would result in getting knocked off the first 20 results and would take around 60 days to recover the rank.

For a downtime exceeding 1 day and upto 2 days (approximately), Google might not remove the results from the search index but will not display them on the search engine results page. This will help visitors to not waste time as they would be heading to a offline website.

For a downtime exceeding 2 days (approximately), Google will start dropping the pages permanently off the search index, assuming that the website has been shutdown. This time varies for websites based on their popularity, in the case of Net4.com, Google Search took 9 days to stop showing the website's URL as a result for the keywords "Net4" and "Net4.com".

What about your website ? Is it still among the results ? Give it a check, it will most likely be not. You could have saved the rank, if it was set to "503 - Service Unavailable (Temporarily Unavailable)", but you never had a chance since the Name Servers were down. With 14 days of downtime, it is most likely your website is purged from Google Search Index. Don't feel bad, OK!, it was not your fault.

 

What to do to get back the Rank ?

Well, you need to claw back into those ranks inch-by-inch with a step-by-step formula. Long topic, we will write about it some other time, but, to keep it brief, these are points worthy keeping in mind:

The money that you spent for SERP earlier is practically gone.

You might need to start afresh again, get the SEO tightened up because it will be a long race to regain your space.

You might need to spend on advertising for the keywords you once ranked well for, you might even need to advertise for your own domain name as the keyword, because it is off the results page altogether.

Expensive it will be ! But what to do ? Sometimes it pays to be in the same basket as Google and Amazon, unfortunately, in this episode the rich and powerful ones have made a better choice than you when selecting their Domain Registrar.

 

Coming to stat of viewers jumping off to other websites, did you know that if your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, 40% viewers will abandon it and go back to the next result ? Every page of FreeSupport.in loads in 1 Second across the world. The layout auto-adapts to display according to the target device. So, If you wish to share this article, please do so with the link or the sharing buttons at the bottom so that the viewer will have a similar experience.

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Current Status Update

We have created a "Current Status Page" with up to date information about the availability of Net4India's Website, Name Servers, Web Servers, Mail Servers along with the status of ICANN "DARTP Bulk Transfer".

 

You can check it here : LINK