Companies are not putting enough resources into maintaining resilient websites, according to experts at a NetEvents forum.

Steve Broadhead, of Broadband Testing, said he found alarming levels of downtime at the websites of major companies and organisations in Britain and the US. “We were genuinely shocked by the results.”

Local authority sites were the worst, with one having 176 hours of downtime during the test period, but there were “significant” failures even at ecommerce sites.

“Sometimes, when a site went down at 3am, say, it was likely that the company was doing some maintenance. But there was nothing on the site to warn people or apologise,” Broadhead told the forum at Evian, France.

He added: “The vast majority of companies were not aware of the downtime at all.”

He asked why it was that the 21^st century internet could not achieve the “five nines” – the 99.999 percent reliability of the plain old telephone network.

John Earley, of MyWebAlert, which offers to monitor a website’s availability for free, conducted the testing in conjunction with Broadhead’s company. He told the forum: “Testing was done over one or two months, but if it had been over a year I am sure that all companies would have shown downtime.”

He expected to see companies put in sufficient resources to fix problems when their site goes down, he said, but that didn’t happen.

Earley added: “I think the technical community – the IT managers, the webmasters, etc – don’t give a monkey’s about the website quite frankly.”

Phil Crocker, European marketing manager for clustered storage specialist Isilon Systems, said there was still a lot of ignorance about the need for load-balancing servers. He pointed out: “Hardware fails... you have to do something to mitigate that fact.”

Paul di Leo, chief-executive of Zeus, which develops traffic management software, said web sites go down because companies don’t put any redundancy into the system to provide a fallback if anything goes wrong.

“There’s no resilience. They buy the cheapest stuff they can get… They’ll do anything but spend money on their web site.”

High-street retailers spent a fortune ensuring that their premises met the needs of their business. “But when it come to their web site… You can’t get in. They can’t transact business. They lose you credit-card details,” di Leo said.

Reports on the website testing done by Broadband Testing are available here.

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