Uptime is a measure of the time a computer system has been “up” and running. It came into use to describe the opposite of downtime, times when a system was not operational. The uptime and reliability of computer and communications facilities is sometimes measured in nines (similar to the unit of metallic purity). “Five nines” means 99.999% availability, which translates to a total downtime of approximately five minutes and fifteen seconds per year. [Wikipedia]
Uptime is increasingly important. For some sites that we’ve developed and that we maintain, there are “incidents” with uptime. We host a recipe site, and every so often something pops up that needs to be dealt with right now. That’s just the nature of high traffic websites. You come to expect it.
We now use a lot of services on the web, and those often require a ton of work to keep up and running at top performance. Some folks do a great job of it, like Google and 37signals. Some companies fall flat on their face, despite running a service that you’re paying good money for, and that you expect to just work.
Like GoFaxer.
About a month ago, we signed up for this promising service. They are one of a number of companies that will provide you with a fax number, and let you send and receive faxes via email or the web. It’s a great idea, because I hate fax machines with a passion. The problem is, as you might be able to see from the above link, is that they’ve been down for 23 days now. The service has not functioned almost the entire time we’ve been paying for it. The same vague message has been shown this whole time.
All of us are working hard to quickly resolve this issue so that we can bring our services back online. However this process may take some time and we apologize for any inconvenience that this unforeseeable issue has caused you.
Maybe we just don’t need a fax service after all.
