Crelate Talent has been in “private beta” for almost a year now and I wanted to provide a quick update on our “uptime” statistics. Before I get into the numbers, let’s talk about what uptime is and how we plan to maximize it. Our uptime track record has been very good — we are on track to move out of private beta next month.
Let’s start with what uptime is and how it affects our users. Wikipedia defines uptime as a measure of time that a computer is workable and available. For us, this means that Crelate is both running and available to our users. We measure this by a series of monitors that work both inside and outside our network to determine if things are running smoothly internally and if they are available externally. Now let’s get to the numbers:
Throughout our beta program, we have maintained a consistent level of service above +99.98% uptime on a monthly basis and +99.99% on an annualized basis. This is pretty darn good and clearly demonstrates our level of service availability. In fact this is better uptime than Microsoft’s Office 365 has achieved during the same time period. This is also above our service level guarantee for premium subscribers of “three-nines” or 99.9%. You can read all about “the nines” at this Wikipedia article on high-availability. To be clear, 100% uptime is incredibly hard to achieve, even Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, GoDaddy and others do not claim or achieve this goal. What is important is how downtime is reported, minimized and handled. It takes company-wide dedication, excellent technical resources and a lot of care to maintain business critical applications such as ours.
So, what does this all mean for our customers? First, it means Crelate is both highly available and transparent about our statistics. Second, that any cloud-based service, such as Crelate, is only really usable if our servers are working and you can get to your data. We take uptime very seriously and strive every day to achieve 100% availability. For the last 11 months (the length of our beta program), 8 months were at 100% uptime! For the three months were we did have brief outages, two of these outages were caused by major service disruptions that also affected tens of thousands of other sites and services. During our beta, we have been able to use each outage, however brief, to identify ways to further strengthen all aspects of our service. This includes additional layers of redundancy as well as faster monitoring and reporting of issues to our support team. We look forward to sharing our uptime statistics in the future and providing tools for our users to check on our status themselves.
