Not exactly a crown one wants to wear
(Update: If you’re arriving here Jan. 29, 2010, chances are you’re looking for info about the latest BoA Web site outage. I don’t have much yet, but what I do know can be found here.)
Bank of America, which boasts of having more than 20 million active online customers, ranks dead last among 43 U.S. banks in terms of Web site availability for September and October, according to figures released today by Pingdom, an uptime monitoring service based in Sweden.
(Update, April 4, 2007: BoA having more Web site trouble?)
“The biggest is not always the best, at least not when it comes to Web site availability,” says Pingdom in a press release. “Out of the sites surveyed, the Bank of America Web site was by far the worst. During September and October, their Web site was unavailable for a total of more than two days and three hours. This is almost twice as much as the First Bank Web site, the second worst, and more than 30 times as much as BB&T in tenth place.”
According to Pingdom, it was “several long periods of downtime is what caused the Bank of America Web site to rank at the bottom of the list, the longest lasting close to 10 hours.” Overall, the site had an uptime of 96.51 percent.
Efforts to reach Bank of America for comment have been unsuccessful. However, the bank’s Web site notes that:
“Bank of America is a leading provider of online financial services, and its online site, http://www.bankofamerica.com/, has received widespread recognition. Bank of America has the most online bankers in the world, according to Financial Insights. The site is among the top 50 of all U.S.-based Internet properties in terms of unique visitors monthly, and No. 1 among business and finance sites, according to comScore Media Metrix.”
And while the site fared poorly in this Pingdom report, it has accumulated its share of accolades, according to Bank of America.
“Bank of America won the Webby Award and Webby People’s Choice Award in 2006 in the online banking/bill pay category. … In 2006, Nielsen/NetRatings said Bank of America is the top online full-service bank destination in terms of audience, page views and active reach on the site. In 2005, the site was ranked among the Forbes Best of the Web.”
All of which means little, of course, if your site goes dark for 10 hours.
Following Bank of America on the list of 10 poorest performers are First Bank, Compass Bank, Colonial Bank, PNC, Banco Popular, Union Bank of California, AmSouth Bank, Regions and BB&T.
A number of banks did very well by the Pingdom report. A pair of institutions — KeyBank and Comerica — logged 100 percent uptime performances over the two-month period.
The full results can be seen in this Excel spreadsheet on the Pingdom site.
And it seems worth noting here that several months back I opened an account with Bank of America — although, I’ve had precious little experience, bad or good, with its Web site. … Had been looking forward to it, though; now, not so much.
(Update: Bank of America responds Tuesday morning: “I’m not familiar with the company and its study or how they measure availability, but can tell you that according to Keynote Systems, Bank of America was ranked as the No. 1 site among all online banking sites in its Web Excellence Scorecard for Banks,” says Betty Riess, a Bank of America spokeswoman. “We also ranked No. 1 in the Keynote Service Level Rankings for Banking Web Sites in both the overall site responsiveness and reliability categories. Also, based on (the findings of monitoring firm) Gomez, we have an average availability of 99.06%.”)
