Running an e-commerce business isn't just about keeping your website up and running. Customers rely on your ability to serve them via telephone, fax, email, or other means, and it requires all of your systems to be working to be able to fulfill customer requests. Often, a single failure in your infrastructure can disable your ability to serve clients, ship orders, answer calls, and process transactions.

System downtime has a cost well beyond the time you spend fixing the product. The total cost of a system outage includes increased labor cost to handle customer service concerns, lost revenue from refunded or cancelled orders, customer dissatisfaction, and the opportunity costs in spending your time not working on your business.

There are a variety of different infrastructure components that an e-commerce business relies on to operate including electrical power, Internet access, website hosting, email, and core software applications. If any one of these systems fails, the ability to serve your customers can be disrupted.

One of the biggest failure potential points is your ISP access point. If your connection to the Internet is down, you can't send or receive email, monitor your store for orders, or generate shipping documents. Most small e-commerce businesses rely on DSL or cable Internet services. An inexpensive back-up option exists for both. Inexpensive high-speed wireless Internet access is becoming more commonly available.

When you have multiple ISP access points, you'll need to set-up your network to use both your primary and secondary services. Inexpensive, but powerful, routers can be configured to monitor the ISP access of your providers, and automatically route your Internet access via whatever service is up. This keeps your operations running without disruption, even if your DSL or cable is down.

The newest Internet based toll free services offer a very creative solution to your inbound call handling needs. In addition to being very inexpensive, these systems can be set-up to route your inbound toll free calls to multiple different phone numbers. This way, if your landline is down, your customers can still reach you because your toll free service can route your calls to your VOIP or cellular phone number without disruption.

In areas of the country where power is less reliable, you need to be creative in the set-up of your electrical systems. Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS's) can give you short-term back-up power, while assuring you have clean, spike free electricity flowing to your devices. Make sure all your critical equipment has a UPS including routers, modems, switches, phones, servers, and of course your PCs.

For longer-term power outages, make sure you have a back-up generator available to power your systems. Inexpensive generators are available at your home center, and an electrician can wire in a basic generator connection switches that can switch over your circuits to the generator with the flip of a switch. Test this system periodically to make sure the generator starts easily, and all the devices are plugged into the proper circuits.

Most online stores are hosted at reliable web hosts. One of the most critical integration items it to make sure your payment processing system is equally reliable. It doesn't do any good to have a reliable website that can't process a credit card when a customer makes a purchase.

Should you be unfortunate enough to suffer a true catastrophic failure of your systems, you will need a back up of your business records and data files to get back up and running. It is vital you back-up your systems including your local PC, and take copy of your files off-site to a secure location at least once a week.

The worst time to find out that one of your back-up systems isn't working is when your primary system fails. To keep your online store running well, test your back-up systems periodically, and perform required maintenance when things are running well. Trying to fix your back up systems when your primary system is down is a double whammy to your business.

A carefully thought out set of investments in your infrastructure can make your life much less stressful, and can reap a good return on investment. An online store doing $500,000 in revenue per year risks over $100 per hour when business is incapacitated by a system outage. Only 1% of downtime per year can cost up to $3,000. When you consider that you may have ten critical systems, if each is 99.9% reliable, combined they are going to cost you 1%.