How critical is website uptime? Uptime refers to whether a website or web service is available to users over a given period.
Website uptime is generally expressed in percentages. Many companies try and aim for 100% uptime but that’s not always achievable. According to some reports, sites like Google, Amazon and Facebook aim for 99.999% uptime. These five nines equate to no longer than 5.25 minutes of downtime a year.
At SchemeServe, our uptime has been 99% for the last 15 years and usually stands at 99.99%. The reason we have achieved this record is because we put a lot of effort into our architecture, updating our code base and hosting infrastructure. There is a lot of hardware, processes and expertise required to make it all work.
Reasons for downtime
Big or small – no one is immune to the potential of downtime. There are a number of reasons why a website or application would suffer down time. These include high traffic, unreliable web hosting, poor coding, hackers, ransomware, virus attacks and plugin/extension errors.
There have been a number of companies that have had problems with their websites or applications recently. This includes American multinational financial services business Wells Fargo which saw their mobile app and online banking go down last year last year and on UK soil, Currys PC World experienced an online store outage on Black Friday this year.
In the UK tech industry, SSP confirmed it was experiencing issues with its SSP Pure Broking application last month. According to Insurance Age, SSP apologised to brokers for ‘ongoing disruption’. This was caused by issues affecting access to their broker platform.
The negative impact of downtime
So how important is a software provider’s uptime record? Well, in our view it’s very important and should certainly be one of the considerations when choosing a broker platform or software provider.
Downtime can be disruptive and, depending on how swiftly a company reacts to resolve the issue, can make you lose money. Loyal customers may wait but, in a world where competition is rife, companies and retail customers have the choice of getting services elsewhere.
If customers or businesses lose money there’s also the reputational damage to consider – and that can be far harder to recover from.
As we said earlier, disruption can occur at any time for any reason. Even software providers are not immune. But what matters too is what software providers put in place to ensure the disruption is minimal. SchemeServe boasts a cloud-based system, using enterprise level software, which gives our users peace of mind that their data and information is always backed up, available at the greatest speeds and easily retrieved in the event of a disruption to the service.
Downtime of a system can be costly to businesses. This is why we operate on multiple servers within the UK and across Europe. This means that, should one server or datacentre fail for any reason, systems will be unaffected as they will be operating on a parallel server which will kick in automatically.
To check SchemeServe’s uptime record, click here.
Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
