July 16, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The online presence of major, UK newspaper The Times (timesonline.co.uk) is making headlines because, while the print version has been around since 1785, Times Online is not so reliable, leading news sites worldwide in downtime.
On Wednesday, web site monitoring service provider Pingdom announced the results of a survey of 13 of the world's top news websites for the first half of 2008, focusing on measuring uptime. Five of the websites had less than an hour of downtime during the six-month period, with the top mark given to Forbes (forbes.com), which scored zero downtime.
New York Times (nytimes.com) and CNN (cnn.com) rounded out the top three, being unavailable a just 20 and 25 minutes respectively.
Eight of the websites in the test posted "three nines," or 99.9 percent uptime or better.
Pingdom shows most major news sites have high reliability, with some as high as 100%
The longest continuous outages were also recorded. The International Herald Tribune (iht.com) was unavailable for almost 11 hours starting in the morning of April 6, making it the longest outage, followed by Times Online and ABC News (abcnews.go.com).
Pingdom performed the tests once a minute around the clock to check if a website did not respond, failed to load within 30 seconds or responded with an error. Downtime was always double-checked from two different locations.
The websites included in the survey were Forbes, CNN, New York Times, Voice of America, Washington Post, Bloomberg, BBC News, Guardian Unlimited, Reuters, ABC News, Christian Science Monitor, International Herald Tribune, and Times Online.
