When you used Google or Yahoo for personal e-mail and it did not work, your business life probably did not suffer. Add word processing, spreadsheets, sales data plus other yet-to-be-imagined applications, then the operation of these public sites is an issue. Small businesses and independently employed individuals have come to rely on these public sites to support their business operations, as well as provide social contacts. Salesforce.com now has "Salesforce for Google Adwords". The process has Google carry the advertisements and capture the leads on an enterprise's web site. The tracking of the leads converts to potential customers within Salesforce. The dependence on the availability of Google becomes apparent.
When the Internet was small and there were far fewer websites, the Internet and the sites were not as important to enterprises. This is no longer the case. I am one of the many who are on the Internet nights and weekends doing work. We expect the sites to be continuously available. The sites can go down for many reasons; some are real failures of the network access, equipment or electrical power. Other failures occur when system upgrades are performed and by human error. One well known video sharing site was inaccessible because of routing table changes by an ISP. Another problem occurred when two ISPs stopped their peering relationship, which blocked traffic.
A recent article in the New York Times points out several outages that affected websites such as RIM (Research In Motion), Amazon.com and Yahoo. Yahoo Merchant Solutions was out for 14 hours, affecting thousands of e-commerce enterprises during the Christmas season.
A new free service is Twitter. According to Wikipedia, "Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates (otherwise known as tweets) which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS and e-mail". Although many use Twitter for personal networking, I can imagine many, especially mobile business users, employing twitter to keep in contact with others. Twitter is free, but if you come to depend on its operation, its failure can be serious.
There is a new service, "Down for everyone, or just me?" that will inform you when websites are not available www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com. At last count, this site monitors 1,336 other sites. You can access it free to monitor one server. For a fee $4.99, 5 servers can be checked every 30 minutes or for $9.99 or 10 servers can be checked every 15 minutes. Notifications are sent via e-mail or to a cell phone.
As websites offer more business services and enterprises continue to expand their use of these public sites, the site availability information gains in importance. Knowing the status of the sites in use can rapidly determine where the problem exists when the site inaccessible.
The downforeveryoneorjustme.com site will have its growing pains and will probably have some down time as well. It's ironic, the downforeveryoneorjustme.com site was moved to Google. The Google App engine, a service supporting interactive web applications went down for several hours taking down the very site that is supposed to report on the Google availability.
