Electricity and Your Business

Jennifer McClelland | RSS | Fri, Oct 16 2009 | 1 Comment

Electricity is important for your business and maintaining a constant power source is extremely important to your business especially if you run your business online. Electric services typically come from a local power company or regional carrier. Sometimes the lines are old and should be replaced.

You may not have an extremely reliable power source in your home (I know that we don’t, it seems like every single time the wind blows just the right way our power goes out) but wherever your servers are located, they need to have constant power and backups whenever possible.

Because of the power situation at my own house, I have often talked to Chris about maybe getting a generator. In June, a tornado made the decision to roll through our neighborhood, and while it was small, it knocked power out to our neighborhood for over a day and then when the power did finally come back on, it was intermittent.

I get tired of worrying about the electricity and having reliability issues with the company. I mean, the neighborhood I live in has only been here since 2004. That means the power lines aren’t that old and the power constantly goes out, more than when we lived in our last apartment which was well over 30 years old.

It is important for any business to have some kind of back up generator to maintain operations during a power outage, particularly if perishables are involved. When the tornado came through a few months ago, a local gas station was completely out of power and without a back up source, all the ice cream that they kept in refrigerators in the front of the store melted and was ruined. Luckily, the convenience store has a walk in freezer in the back and was able to keep the remainder of the food intact while the power was out. Also, the store got its power back hours before we did at our house which is less than half a mile away.

If power goes out to your servers and your business is online, it could cause confusion with your clients. They don’t know what’s going on because they typically have no idea where your servers are located and what is going on. All they know is that the website that they are trying to visit is down and when the server is down, you may lose those clients permanently.

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Tags: regional carrier, reliability issues, perishables