Study reveals that small and medium sized enterprises suffer up to two weeks a year in lost productivity caused by server downtime.

Fasthosts, a hosting service provider, today released a study report conducted by them on the extent of server downtime problem.

According to the reports, small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) suffer up to two weeks a year in lost productivity, caused by server downtime. Server downtime commonly caused by applying service packs and software patches, random bugs and errors in administration means that small firms can be left with no access to their business applications and data for nearly nine working days a year. It also revealed that a typical SMB requires an average of 16 hardware resets every 12 months. This, coupled with an average of four hours response time offered by IT support companies, can leave them waiting for a system restore for 64 hours a year. Fasthosts also believes that small firms cannot afford to wait for server delivery and set up, which can take up to four weeks.

As a result of customer feedback, Fasthosts introduced a feature allowing users to control their servers remotely and reboot them online as required by simply clicking a restart button on a control panel. Their dedicated server offers the user permanent keyboard, video and mouse control by using a self-powered on board card. This includes changing BIOS configuration access, hardware reset and remote desktop (Windows) as well as SSH (Linux). The dedicated server is available from £49 per month.

"Server downtime impacts all companies, large and small, but it is the smaller ones that feel the brunt," said Andrew Michael, CEO, Fasthosts. "Unable to perform daily business operations, SMEs put their livelihood on the line every time the server goes down."