Big number 4 million. And we’re talking about only one month’s worth of cumulative downtime for an estimated 51.3 million active Web sites, according calculations noodled out by Pingdom, an uptime monitoring company based in Sweden.
Four million. One month. Wow.
But there’s more to this fun-with-big-numbers exercise than wow. Take 99.73, for example: That’s the average uptime for the typical site, says Pingdom; or, put another way, downtime averages one minute shy of two hours per site for the month.
But what’s that mean? Good? Bad? Indifferent?
In a 31-day month like March, 1 hour and 59 minutes equals 99.73% uptime. That is fine for something non-critical, but it could be an expensive affair for a commercial website. It should also be noted that since this is an average number, some websites have no downtime at all, while others have a lot more. It’s also interesting to note that many Web hosting companies offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which is the equivalent of 44 minutes of downtime in a month. Websites on average are obviously not reaching these uptime numbers.
And not only is that costing companies revenue, it’s taking a bite in terms of unpleasant public relations.
Take Bank of America, for example. Pingdom called out BoA for particularly poor performance late last year. And the bank was again having problems earlier this month, which we chronicled here.
Google Apps and Salesforce.com have also found themselves on the wrong side of bad headlines recently, with the latter’s troubles prompting one expert to suggest that such shoddy service needs to be treated as one (not me) might treat a yet-to-be-housebroken puppy: i.e., rolled up newspaper to the nose.
So while that 4 million doesn’t really mean much of anything other than that it’s a big number, closing the gap between 99.73 and 99.9 should mean something – lest one wants to risk a rolled up newspaper to the nose.
(Update: Add Turbo Tax to the list.)
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