For instance, an HHS chart – which Zients boasted about – shows system uptime now at 95.1 percent (excluding scheduled maintenance), which compares to 42.9 percent a month ago. But, the industry standard is for websites to be available for users 99.9 percent of the time. Anything below that is considered a failure and 95.1 percent is a disaster.
A 2012 study by web monitoring firm Panopta that looked at the performance of 130 major retailers’ websites from January to August 2012 found that the lowest uptime rate was 99.34 percent.
Another study by web performance firm Pingdom that looked at retail websites during the 2011 holiday shopping season, found that nearly half of the websites (such as Amazon and eBay) were up 100 percent of the time. The lowest performing was Foot Locker, which was at 98.573 percent.
A 95.1 percent uptime means that over the course of a year, a website would be down for about 18 days. Alternatively, imagine what a disaster it would be for sales if, during the holiday shopping season, Amazon’s website were down for about a day and a half, excluding scheduled maintenance.
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