LONDON, April 18/PRNewswire/ -- Of the 100 companies listed on the FTSE, 57 have websites with poor availability. Many of the sites are badly accessible or unavailable for more than an hour per month.
The worst site, that of United Utilities, is even unavailable for an equivalent of more than 5 days per month.
This was the conclusion drawn from the WatchMouse Site Availability Index for the FTSE 100, created by WatchMouse, a company supplying monitoring services for websites and e-commerce applications worldwide. In order to determine the extent to which the sites of FTSE 100 achieve a satisfactory uptime, WatchMouse monitored the sites continuously between March 2 and April 10, 2006. Every five minutes, one of WatchMouse's test stations tried to access the homepage of the site, which was expected to download within 8 seconds, without any errors.
An uptime of 99.9% is seen as the minimum acceptable level. This percentage is also often quoted in service level agreements (SLAs) with hosting providers. There were fourteen sites which achieved perfect 100% availability. The availability of the two worst performers was less than 91%; Scottish Power (90.78%) and United Utilities (81.53%).
Mark Pors, chief technology officer at WatchMouse, stated that he was "very surprised" by the results. "With several sites, we found an uptime that was worse than that of many smaller companies. This is worrying as the FTSE companies in particular should give a great deal of priority to their corporate image. Maximum uptime should be part of the overall 'brand performance'."
Pors suspects that for some sites, the popularity could be a reason for poor availability. "Some of the sites belonging to FTSE 100 will get a lot of traffic. However, this is no excuse; if we look at large online brokers in the US, for example, all achieve an uptime in excess of 99.9%."
A complete overview of the monitoring results of the WatchMouse Site Availability Index, listing the 100 sites, can be found on http://www.watchmouse.com/en/SPI/2006/FTSE100.php
About WatchMouse
Companies can easily monitor their own Internet sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. Further information can be found at: www.watchmouse.com
Source: WatchMouse
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