This survey shows the downtime in minutes for Fatsecret, CozmoTV, Sonopia, Fotowoosh, LeapTag, Zwinky, Writewith, Kyte, Visible Path and ScratchYourself over the last month and half.

Having good availability is important to any website, and even more so to web applications and other online services. After all, their users access them solely over the web. When a website is down, it’s the equivalent of closing the shop.

TechCrunch is, as most of you already know, a very popular blog that covers a lot of different web 2.0 startups. We (Pingdom) decided to monitor the uptime of ten of the startup websites mentioned in TechCrunch during April, just to get a general idea of how web startups are handling their availability.

The monitored sites were, just in case you missed the intro, Fatsecret, CozmoTV, Sonopia, Fotowoosh, LeapTag, Zwinky, Writewith, Kyte, Visible Path and ScratchYourself. A healthy mix of different services.

The uptime monitoring was performed from May 4 to June 18; a month and a half.

Website downtime in minutes

As you can see, the results are quite varied. The diet site Fatsecret didn’t have a single minute of downtime, while ScratchYourself on the other hand had 4 hours and 43 minutes of downtime during the same period.

Only three sites had more than an hour of downtime: ScratchYourself, Visible Path and Kyte.

The average downtime per month for these ten websites is around 40 minutes, which has to be considered to be within acceptable limits, even though zero downtime is of course preferred by users. After all, the web never sleeps.

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