When you’re looking for a company to build and/or host your medical website, it is a good idea to select a company that specializes in healthcare web hosting to ensure that online risks are avoided and compliance is maintained. In addition to protecting patients’ personal health information (PHI), a high quality website with little downtime should be a top priority.
In parts one and two of the five part article series, security and HIPAA compliance were discussed. The importance of uptime for medical website hosting is showcased in part three.
3. Uptime
Website uptime is a crucial factor for maintaining your healthcare organization’s online reputation, but more importantly, your revenue and amount of new customers could be negatively impacted if your website goes down. Website downtime can also be a burden to patients if they are unable to access health or contact information from your website. Because of this, it is necessary to have a web hosting company that keeps a constant watch on the uptime of your website. If there is no consistent monitoring system for your medical site, there is a high chance that your website will experience downtime issues.
While there is no standard uptime for healthcare websites, desired uptime is defined by how critical the webpages are, especially if patients are able to access health information files or a patient portal on the site. Uptime is measured as a percentage in a given year and can be used to measure the performance of a web host. There is 99.9% uptime for websites that are hosted by Medical Web Experts.
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If there does happen to be a short window of downtime, we are alerted at the exact moment the site goes down because of our advanced monitoring system, Nagios. Nagios offers complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services. In the event of a failure, Nagios immediately alerts our technical staff of the problem, which allows them to fix the problem before it affects online customers or business processes. Our response time is determined in a SLA (Service Level Agreement) with each of our clients, where we define the response times for different types of problems.
Uptime is an important part of medical website hosting as it benefits your healthcare organization’s online reputation, revenue, and business processes. Scalability is also a crucial part of web hosting, which is discussed in part four.
View the complete web hosting article series here:
Are you interested in medical website hosting for your healthcare organization? Medical Web Experts currently manages nearly 20 servers for our client’s websites, with 24/7 response to emergency issues and real-time server monitoring. Contact us here, or call 1-866-932-9944, to learn more.
