For more than a week, SixSig was down. So un-Six Sigma right? A blog about Six Sigma should have known how to prevent a downtime. 
Well, the downtime hit me right when I was not expecting it, which is usually the case. We all know that downtime can be costly.
In manufacturing, downtime usually occurs during maintenance check of equipment or worse, a sudden breakdown of equipment. This can be prevented by putting a system and corresponding budget for regular maintenance check, which is less costly.
When we talk of maintenance problem, we often hear people say that the problem with downtime is you cannot monitor it, measure it, log it, report it, track it, attack it, or delegate it. But downtime will not go away until you “eliminate it,” that is, prevent it from happening in the first place.
How? Lean maintenance is often recommended.
For websites or weblogs, downtime can be any one of the following reasons:
Can these be eliminated? For numbers 1 to 3, yes. As they say, if there’s a will, there’s a way. For number 4, it depends. I think hackers have made it their business to unlock any security there is. As I write, I have yet to restore my other pages, the Six Sigma Interview and Six Sigma Study Guide.
Now what about the cost of the downtime?
Basically if your site is earning per ad impression or clicks, you compute the earnings when the site is up during that same length of time that the site is down.
So for example a page of your site gets 10,000 views a day, then the advertiser pays $1 per 1,000 times their ad is shown, you earn $10 per day. If the site is down for a day, you will lose $10 per advertiser.
That is only a conservative estimate, and not considering the effect of a downtime on the pagerank. Ouch!
Related source:
Lean Maintenance ™ using Six Sigma DMAIC
