40% of the UK's Top Retail Web Sites Fail Availability Test

[mandy]

Forty percent of Web sites operated by the UK's largest retailers have experienced problems with availability, research shows. During a month-long test conducted by monitoring firm MyWebAlert, sites run by retailers including HMV, Next, Sainsbury's and WHSmith failed to achieve industry availability targets of 99.999 percent. Previous research by MyWebAlert into the online availability of Web sites of FTSE 1000 organizations found that 43 percent recorded significant failures during the course of December 2005, and the retail sector has fared nearly as badly...

"WHSmith and HMV both complain that Amazon has robbed them of business, but Amazon performed well during the test period, and it is companies with high availability who will win in the e-economy."...

full article: http://ecommercetimes.com/story/XhtKATXE...Test.xhtml

Small merchants who skimp on web hosting by choosing the cheapest host would be well advised to ponder the following quote: "it's companies with high availability who will win in the e-economy".