We are all spending more and more of our lives online. Part of the reason for this is simply that the internet provides us with what we need instantly. When we want advice on anything related to our local council, most of us won’t pick up the phone anymore, well, not that phone. We will go for the smartphone or the laptop and look for the answer online. Anything to minimize the amount of human interaction involved.
And yet anyone who has ever tried to navigate the minefield of British government websites will know that they are very much a mixed bag. Some websites run flawlessly and offer a reliable service, and these are to be cherished! Unfortunately, most government websites aren’t made this way. They have a tendency to contain conflicting or outdated information, to not contain things that it seems obvious to contain, to send you on wild goose chases round other websites, and sometimes they don’t load at all!
StatusCake
StatusCake have conducted research into British governmental websites, their uptime, and the speed with which they load. Typically, we measure uptime as a percentage; if your uptime is 50%, this means that anyone trying to connect to your website is just as likely to fail as they are to succeed. The industry standard for a commercial hosting package is 99% uptime. Anything below this figure is considered to be indicative of some very poor backroom work.
Which makes it somewhat disappointing to learn that Liverpool council was unable to meet this figure. In fact, they scored a worryingly low 95.32% uptime of their website. But what does that actually mean?
Downtime
That figure might still sound okay to most people. After all, 95% means that the website is accessible virtually all the time, right? Well, not quite. You see, whereas anyone can measure a website’s uptime by executing a few simple lines of code on their computer, StatusCake went one step further. They put together a cheat sheet which allowed them to convert these percentages into more familiar time formats.
That 95.32% uptime means that the Liverpool council website was unavailable for 1 day, 9 hours, and 50 minutes over the course of a single month. Over the course of a year, this comes out at 17 days, 3 hours, and 43 minutes of time. For people who rely on the council website for emergency information, such as someone who has just been made homeless and needs to find out what to do, this kind of downtime could have serious repercussions.
The Test
The researchers gathered their data by simply connecting to a list of domains every ten minutes for a period of a month. This very simple setup allowed for a calculation of an average uptime:downtime ratio. It was then that the Status Cake cheat sheet could allow them to work out how those percentages translated into time.
We all rely increasingly on online services in our day to day lives. Whether we are shopping, researching, or even socialising, we have gotten used to everything being there on demand. So, it seems strange that our local government is not waking up to the importance of better infrastructure.