Still a lot of work in store

A study conducted by Watchmouse has revealed that, in 2008, Dutch web stores have been harder to reach than in 2007. In other words, the average uptime has dropped from 99.5% to 99.4 % and 6 out of 38 investigated online stores produced very bad uptime.

Ranking first on the list of best uptime websites, there is Ebay, followed by Conrad.com and Neckermann. During the test month, Hunkemoller has been offline for no less than 2 days. E-shop turnover in the Netherlands approximates 5,000,000,000 euros. But in order to sell, the door to a store must be open, or else people will not buy online.

This clearly illustrates the importance of hosting for e-commerce websites. During the last edition of the E-commerce Forum in Brussels, COMBELL representatives were invited speakers and talked about the importance of hosting in the frame of e-commerce. The most important elements in this frame are a clear Service Level Agreement (SLA), a dependable monitoring system, good hosting infrastructure and a reliable hosting partner that thinks along with its customers.