Last week we published a report about website uptime for airlines.

We had monitored the uptime of 42 international airline websites during a period of four months. The results were quite surprising so we figured we would share some of our findings here as well.

The full report is available as a free PDF, but below is a brief summary of the main points.

Key findings

Here are some of the discoveries we made:

• Below average uptime. The average uptime for the entire group of 42 websites was 99.49%. Over a year, a 99.49% uptime is the equivalent of more than 44 hours of downtime. This is worse than the average for websites on the Internet which hovers around 99.6%, the equivalent of 35 hours of downtime in a year.
• The most reliable. Only 13 out of the 42 tested websites (31%) had a 99.9% uptime or better: KLM (99.99%), United (99.98%), Japan Airlines (99.98%), Frontier (99.98%), Virgin Blue (99.96%), Open Skies (99.95%), Skynet Asia (99.95%), British Airways (99.94%), ANA Sky (99.94%), Air France (99.93%), NWA (99.92%), Eva Air (99.92%), Southwest (99.91%). American Airlines was close to enter this list, with 99.89% uptime.
• The unreliable. 26 out of 42 (62%) had less than 99.8% uptime, which is what we consider the minimum acceptable limit for such important websites. In this sense, 62% of the airline websites failed this test.
• The ones with the most problems. 5 out of the 42 websites (12%) had less than a 99.0% uptime. That is the equivalent of more than 3 days and 15 hours of downtime in a year. These sites were JetBlue, Cayman Airways, SAS, Korean Air and Egyptair.
• The pattern. Among the websites that ended up below a 99.8% uptime, frequent short outages were the most common problem.

We consider 99.8% to be the minimum required uptime for websites this important. We know that this is achievable by professional websites run by companies with far less resources than airlines.

A 99.8% uptime means that a website can be unavailable for a total of 17 hours and 31 minutes in a year. This should be enough time to cover any maintenance needs, and a quick reaction time when there is a problem with the website can minimize any other downtime to acceptable limits.

Ideally, the aim for websites this important (i.e. business-critical websites) should be to consistently stay above a 99.9% uptime. Organizations with good resources (like airlines) should be able to manage this.

As you can see by this graph, a significant number of the websites in this test had an availability that was way below the acceptable:

By the way, don’t forget about our Uptime and Downtime Conversion Cheat Sheet in case you want to be able to easily convert between uptime/downtime.

View the full report for more info

The full report contains much more information than we have presented in this post, including:

• Why high availability is important to airline websites
• More information about the sites included in the test (including URLs)
• More key findings
• Uptime distribution chart (shown above)
• Airline website downtime chart
• The longest continuous outages
• Conclusion and methodology
• Appendix with all the data

The full report is freely available as a PDF:
Downtime for international airline websites

Please feel free to spread and share the report as you wish.

The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

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As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

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