If you're considering whether you can afford running more than one server for your business, you're likely to discover that you can't afford not to. Even with the additional operational expenses, you’ll be better off having redundant servers because redundancy minimizes downtime for your critical applications and reduces the costs incurred by outages, which can be huge. The price of downtime is always too high for any business.

Like it or not, IT downtime is a fact of life. Systems fail. Outages happen. The failure rate of cloud servers is roughly 2% annually, for example. The larger the installation, the more frequently outages will occur. The best way to deal with these inevitable worst-case scenarios is to be prepared and minimize the downtime as much as possible.

“Timing is everything,” is a phrase that applies to a lot of things in life, and it’s certainly pertinent when making IT purchasing decisions for your business. If you invest too soon in a technology platform, you might miss out on upcoming innovations that could save money or greatly improve performance. Wait too long, and poor performance on the existing system could reduce employee productivity or repel customers, resulting in inefficient operations and lost sales. It’s not easy to determine exactly the right time for IT upgrades.

Most business leaders have faced a time in their careers when they were eager to grow their companies but were concerned about how they could afford it. That’s because the painful truth is that achieving growth often requires additional investment, whether that’s opening offices in new markets, hiring more employees, increasing marketing spend or ensuring IT systems have enough capacity to keep the business running smoothly at a higher level. It’s not easy to get the right balance of investment across the business to support growth.

Increased traffic on your website is a good sign that your business is doing well. It indicates that you’re getting more visitors and potential new customers to your site, selling more products or services and generating better engagement with your brand and business. But sometimes your site can experience a spike in traffic that will overload your web server, and even bring down your site, if you’re not prepared.

Snapt has just published a helpful e-book on “How to Survive a Traffic Surge” that explains how surges are caused, the consequences for your business and the solutions for protecting your website.

Whether you’re a small startup, SME or large enterprise, if you’re a high-growth company you have aggressive targets to outpace the market. Your investors, employees and customers expect your business to sustain rapid revenue growth, and nothing should get in the way of that. To keep up the pace, your IT systems must be agile. When it comes to the critical task of load balancing that keeps your website and backend systems up and running, a software-based solution is the best way to ensure IT agility to support your business growth.

There is a familiar saying that “time is money,” and in the online realm of digital commerce it couldn’t be more true. That’s because there is a direct relationship between website performance and revenue. That is, the time it takes to load web pages has an immediate impact on a company’s turnover.

The world’s largest online companies have documented how slow website performance results in lost revenues. But this is an issue that affects businesses of all sizes with an online presence. Even highly optimized sites have room to improve. Here we explain how web performance affects the bottom line and offer tips for using web acceleration to speed up poorly performing websites.

Building a strong reseller offering is not easy in today's market. Competition is fierce in the software channel environment, and as a result, revenue targets and margins are coming under pressure. End customers are looking for ways to drive down TCOs while extracting more and more value from their VAR partners. The result of this environment is that progressive VARs are continuously on the hunt for ways of providing value to their customer base. Through doing so, the vendor needs to assist in creating opportunities for the VAR to be able to provide additional value offerings over and above the underlying products. This can be a great - and profitable - differentiating factor!

Your company is growing, and that’s great, but network performance is suffering under the additional load. You’re hearing from the higher-ups that downtime numbers are unacceptable, and site load speed is costing you customers. The pressure is on to take control of these performance issues and implement a cost-effective load balancing solution that will scale with your company’s needs.

First-generation application delivery controllers (ADCs) hit the market in the early 2000s. Since then, we’ve seen the mass adoption of smartphones, a more than 82 percent increase in worldwide internet use, and the morphing of consumers into highly engaged users who demand applications that are feature-rich, fast, and flawless.