Following on from our blog post measuring website speed, we decided to measure uptime of the websites as this is also a very good indication of the quality of web hosting.
So over the past two weeks from 24th March to April 7th 2014, we have monitored the uptime of our website compared to 15 other similar websites in our area (5 web design websites from each of Cardiff, Newport and Caerphilly).
It is important to note that there is no such thing as 100% uptime. Everyone will experience downtime at some point or another – after all, websites are only hosted on computers and we all know computers have issues! Servers also need maintenance and upgrades which are likely to incur planned downtime. What is important is that the duration and frequency of downtime, and the speed of recovery, are minimised. So when a website server has an issue (which it will) the important factors are how quickly that issue is resolved, how fast your website comes back online and how rarely issues like this would occur.
As you can see from our results, uptime dramatically varies between different website providers. The lowest downtime (which includes Amity Web Solutions) is 1 or 2 minutes and the highest being over 7 hours! I think it is reasonable to expect the customers of these companies to have similar uptime issues.
Any downtime could result in business loss. A potential customer could visit a website at its moment of downtime, and with no website available, that visitor would move onto the next provider and spend their money there. The more downtime your website has, the more business you are likely to lose. If your website is a popular eCommerce site the loss could run into thousands of pounds per hour, or even per minute.
So please do not underestimate the importance of website hosting. It is extremely important that businesses have a high standard of website hosting with minimum downtime and fast recovery. Factors of a high standard website hosting service would be a good server provider and server and website monitoring systems to alert the server administrators of potential issues.
Comparison of 15 Website Developers Websites Uptime
| Website | Response Time (ms) | Uptime (%) | Downtime (minutes) |
| Webjects | 118.0 | 99.996 | 1.0 |
| Amity Web Solutions | 100.0 | 99.993 | 2.0 |
| Ozum | 154.0 | 99.993 | 3.0 |
| Cardiff Web Design | 440.0 | 99.988 | 5.0 |
| Orange Drop | 991.0 | 99.96 | 17.0 |
| eInfinity | 413.0 | 99.959 | 17.0 |
| IC Web Design | 419.0 | 99.957 | 18.0 |
| Inky Blue Design | 132.0 | 99.957 | 18.0 |
| Studio 18 Eighty | 112.0 | 99.953 | 20.0 |
| Innivo | 70.0 | 99.926 | 31.0 |
| Bluegg | 771.0 | 99.895 | 45.0 |
| Web Box Digital | 485.0 | 99.873 | 54.0 |
| Simon M Lewis | 133.0 | 99.782 | 93.0 |
| Spin Dogs | 803.0 | 99.7 | 129.0 |
| Pule Web Design | 446.0 | 99.433 | 244.0 |
| Creo | 1112.0 | 98.968 | 445.0 |
* Note: timings include planned downtime, such as server maintenance, and website monitoring occurs every 1 minute so 5 seconds or 55 seconds = 1 minute downtime reported.
Amity Web Solutions’ Server Monitoring Screenshot
Amity Web Solutions’ Website Monitoring Screenshot
