Stan Beer
Thursday, 20 March 2008 03:21
Your IT -
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An EU-based website performance monitoring firm has found that the majority of websites of ASX listed companies have sub-par performance and reliability. Most surprisingly Telstra had the worst score of the sites tested, with poor performance and a high amount of downtime.
WatchMouse, based in in the Netherlands, tested
the sites belonging to Australian’s largest listed companies for
errors, availability and performance. Of the 51 monitored sites, 63%
were found to have ‘good’ or ‘OK’ uptime while an alarming 37% ranked
as ‘poor’. The most concerning inclusion in the list of ‘poor’
performers is that of Australia’s leading telco provider, Telstra with
98.1% uptime. Newscrest and Alumina sites recorded the worst uptime
with 89.7% and 88.5% respectively which equates to both sites being
unavailable for more than 3 days during the month of monitoring.
In line with industry standards, WatchMouse ranks a site’s uptime as
‘good’ if it is ≥99.9%, ‘OK’ if it is between 99.89% - 99.01% and
‘poor’ if it is ≤99%. WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors points out that “99%
uptime sounds great but when you calculate it, this means 80+ hours of
downtime a year. That’s one working day per month.”
WatchMouse monitored the sites between 11 February - 13 March 2008
during which one of WatchMouse’s monitoring stations attempted to
access the homepage of each site every five minutes. Sites were
expected to download within 4 seconds without any errors. Combining the
errors, speed (load time) and availability measurements, WatchMouse
calculated a Site Availability Index (SPI) for each of the sites. An
SPI of ≤1,000 represents a ‘well performing’ site, 1,001 - 1,999 is
regarded as ‘acceptable’, while a score of above 2,000 represents a
site with ‘serious user issues’.
Of the 51 monitored sites, a whooping 26 scored an SPI of above 2,000;
the vast majority as a result of very long load times. Mark Pors said,
“We’re very surprised by these results. We’d expect Australia’s largest
listed companies to place a great deal of importance on having a well
performing site; as a company’s site is a tool to providing investors
with information and to project a professional corporate image. Instead
we’ve found 50% had serious user issues. WatchMouse has been monitoring
sites belonging to companies listed on some of the world’s largest
stock exchanges for many years and never before found such a poor
overall result.”
In its released, WatchMouse stated that it expected a very large telco
like Telstra to have the knowledge, facilities and desire to build a
fast and reliable site. Shockingly, Telstra’s main site
www.telstra.com.au was found to have the worst SPI with a score of
8,018. Other sites with very poor SPIs belong to AGL Energy with 5,129
and Westfarmer with 4,207.
A complete overview of the ASX monitoring results can be found
here.