The study shows that the web sites of more than 43% of companies monitored were subject to unacceptable outage during the month with the extent of downtime in each case exceeding the industry accepted targets for a complete year; in the single month.

A variety of industry sectors are represented in the study. Energy companies fared worst, with one major supplier experiencing more than 50 hours downtime during the month. Of the retailers selected for monitoring, three high street chains experienced web site outage of between 26 minutes and almost of four hours.

Banks, surprisingly, also performed badly with the UK’s pioneering Internet credit card company suffering outages in excess of 1½ hours and other high street chains experiencing an average of 1hr 45mins of service failure.

In each vertical sector the study shows clearly that some organisations get it right, while others appear unable to combat service outage and downtime.

Commenting on the report’s findings, John Earley, Managing Director of MyWebAlert said, "Frankly I am staggered by the results of this exercise. We commissioned the study to prove to SME companies that it is possible to achieve very high levels of web site availability and that MyWebAlert services, priced with their budgets in mind, is to be key in achieving this. Amazingly, while we can point to organisations that appear to succeed against the high availability challenge, I am beginning to wonder if FTSE CIOs might benefit from a low cost service such as ours, although I rather suspect they will prefer to keep spending on over-priced complicated systems that clearly fail them!"

MyWebAlert is keen to point out that it included its own web site as part of the exercise, which experienced 100% availability.

The study was completed using MyWebAlert’s remote web site monitoring service, itself hosted from three disparate international geographic locations where probes poll in turn every five minutes. MyWebAlert claims that its multi-site hosting architecture eradicates the possibility of false reporting due to failures within its own infrastructure, thereby making the results empirical.

For members of the press who wish to follow up the story in more detail, MyWebAlert is willing to share in depth results of the study, including summary reports for each site and copies of individual failure/recovery notifications.