Universities having trouble staying online
December 8th, 2009 Leave a comment Visited 210 times, 1 so far today
In a yearlong survey of university and college websites, higher education institutions may not be ready for the internet education revolution, reports the website monitoring company Uptrends (www.uptrends.com).
In a random sampling of the home page of the websites for 60 universities and colleges across the United States over a 12-month period, almost 25% of universities experienced website downtime of 13 hours or more and 10% of universities experienced downtime of 21 hours or more. Even schools where technology education is strongest were not immune to website downtime problems. For instance, Stanford University, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, experienced downtime of 14 hours and 53 minutes over the course of the study.
Top 10 Most Downtime Recorded:
| University Name | % Uptime | Hours/Minutes Offline |
| Indiana University of Pennsylvania | 98.44% | 136 hours, 40 minutes |
| University of Indianapolis | 99.2% | 70 hours, 4 minutes |
| Oberline College | 99.26% | 64 hours, 49 minutes |
| Delaware State University | 99.39% | 43 hours, 28 minutes |
| Gallaudet University | 99.65% | 30 hours, 39 minutes |
| Purdue University | 99.69% | 27 hours, 9.6 minutes |
| Hamline University | 99.8% | 17 hours, 30 minutes |
| Indiana University | 99.82% | 15 hours, 45 minutes |
| Stanford University | 99.83% | 14 hours, 53 minutes |
| Brown University | 99.85% | 13 hours, 8.4 minutes |
“Colleges and universities across the US are struggling to lower skyrocketing tuition costs by offering an increasing number of courses online” said Andrew Stock, Director of North American Operations for Uptrends. “The field of online education is still relatively new however, and this study seems to indicate that many institutions aren’t quite prepared to shift too much of their workload towards online alternatives until the reliability of their websites sees improvement”.
Methodology: Using worldwide checkpoints in USA, Canada, UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Australia, Uptrends monitored the availability of websites in the study every 5 minutes for 365 days. In cases where a website cannot be reached, a second checkpoint performed the availability check. If the website was still not available it was defined as an error. During the research period, Uptrends was not made aware of maintenance periods of the websites. Uptrends monitored the uptime of the front page of each University website only.
About Uptrends Website, Server and Transaction Monitoring
Uptrends.com has as its mission the increased availability of websites, servers and transactions and the reduction of costly downtime for businesses and entrepreneurs that operate online. The Uptrends monitoring system uses a network of checkpoints in various countries such as the U.S.A., Canada, the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Singapore, China and Australia. More than 1,500 customers in 23 countries rely on Uptrends to keep them informed of their site, server and transaction performance so that potential problems can be identified and downtime reduced as much as possible.
Additional information is available from the following:
Uptrends North America +1 (415) 839-8450
Uptrends UK: 0808-1010-917
www.uptrends.com
For a copy of the full survey results, please contact Uptrends.com
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