(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Many online retailers are experiencing significant amounts of time when their websites are not accessible, according to the results of a month-long study conducted by website monitoring firm Uptrends (www.uptrends.com) leading up to “Black Friday,” traditionally the busiest shopping day in the US.
According to the report released this week, Uptrends monitored the home pages of 100 of the most popular e-commerce sites and determined that a significant number of companies were still experiencing periods of downtime — in some cases excessive downtime.
“What is significant here is that many of these companies are household names and you would assume that there would be considerable resources put in place to ensure their websites were always available,” Uptrends North American operations director Andrew Stock said in a statement. “Repeated downtime of these sites will clearly have a significant impact on the online sales these companies will experience.”
While more than half of the websites monitored experienced no downtime for the length of the 30 day study, 45 percent experienced at least some downtime. Nearly a quarter had downtime between 99.90 percent and 99.99 percent and 21 websites were below 99.6 percent uptime. For a point of reference — a website with uptime of 99.5 percent still has downtime of 3 hours and 36 minutes over the span of a 30 day month.
As the holiday shopping season increases website traffic to most online retail websites, downtime is likely only to increase as the demand on web servers and other infrastructure becomes heavier.
“Overall, the trend over the last few years is for more companies to put more resources and attention into the online versions of their stores. Our intention is to conduct this study again next year in order to gauge whether these online retailers have made any measurable improvements,” Stock said.
Checking the availability of the websites and online services every five minutes, Uptrends’ monitoring method involved the use of worldwide checkpoints in the USA, Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Australia. In case a website cannot be reached, a second checkpoint will perform the availability check. If the website is still not available it will be defined as an error.
