Any business operating across Namibia and the region plans around interruption. Power drops, fibre gets cut, a tower goes down, weather takes out a link to a site outside the main centres.
The instinct is to treat this as an IT problem to be solved with hardware. Some of it is. But a large part is a design problem, and the design decisions are cheaper than the hardware.
Two different problems
| Your side goes down | Their side is weak | |
|---|---|---|
| What happens | You cannot answer, your systems are unreachable | Customer on a poor mobile connection |
| Customer sees | No reply, or a site that will not load | A site that loads slowly or partially |
| Main fix | Redundancy and a communication plan | Lighter pages, offline tolerance |
| Cost | Hardware and connectivity | Mostly build decisions |
Keeping your side reachable
- Host the website somewhere other than your own premises, so an office outage does not take the site down with it.
- Use a second connection from a different provider for anything critical, ideally on a different technology.
- Keep a charged phone with a data bundle as the last resort channel, and make sure someone is responsible for it.
- Put an away message on WhatsApp and email that states when you will be back, not that you are unavailable.
- Publish an alternative contact route that does not depend on the connection that just failed.
Designing for the customer's weak connection
Keep pages light
Under 500 KB where possible. This is the single highest leverage decision.
Put the critical information in text
Phone number, address, hours. Text arrives when images have not.
Never put a phone number only in an image
If the image fails, the customer cannot reach you at all.
Make forms tolerant
A submission that fails should not clear what the person typed.
Cache sensibly
A returning visitor should not re-download everything to see your hours.
Test on a throttled connection
Browser developer tools can simulate a slow connection. Use it before launch, not after complaints.
If your phone number exists only inside a logo image, an outage on the customer's side means they cannot contact you at all.
Write the plan down
One page. Who does what when the power goes, which number customers should use, who posts the update and where, and how you tell people it is resolved.
The plan is worth more than the generator, because the generator only covers one of the failure modes.
