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.

We all know Google is huge and their wide range of services are bound to have a fair share of competitors, but you may be surprised just how wide-ranging Google considers its competition to be.

Here below we have included a quote from Google’s latest SEC filing with some very interesting information about what Google has to say about its competition.

Read more

Big sites and services like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and many others rely heavily on open source software to run their operations. Happily, this isn’t a one-way street. They are also giving back to the open source community, not just by contributing to existing projects, but sometimes by open sourcing their own internal projects, giving back something completely new.

And what these popular sites can contribute is often quite valuable. Since they tend to be very large, they run big operations and have been forced to create solutions for scalability and performance problems that most other sites simply don’t have to deal with.

Read more

Think about the software you use day to day. Depending on your profession and interests, what you use will vary, but some applications tend to show up over and over again. Microsoft Word and Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop, various web browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox, Skype, iTunes, and so on.

When it comes to those widely used, highly established desktop applications, think about how long it’s been since they first saw the light of day. Many of them are practically ancient.

Read more

Is Facebook taking the first steps towards making itself an internet-wide payment platform?

You may know that the company is working on something it calls Facebook Credits (it’s in beta). You can buy Facebook Credits with a credit card or Paypal, and then use these credits as a currency when buying virtual items from applications on the Facebook platform (Facebook apps). A number of apps already use it.

Read more

Supercomputers. There probably isn’t a tech geek out there who doesn’t find them intriguing. Huge, hulking computers with performance that’s ages ahead of what we have on our desktops. They are the most powerful computing devices on the planet.

But where in the world do we find these supercomputers? Where are the fastest ones located? Which countries have the most of them? Read on to find out.

Read more