We’re ready with uptime stats for the e-conomic application in April. Once again, we surpassed our target of 99.9% uptime by reaching an average of 99.93% uptime during the month of April.

Almost all slowdowns went unnoticed by our users, except on April 20 when some users experienced that the system was down for about 10 minutes due to heavy load on the system. Below, you can see our day-by-day uptime performance:

April uptime figures

More users and more functionality

New customers are joining e-conomic all the time. To handle this constant increase in the use of our application, we are of course continually evaluating when to add more hardware to our system.

Last month, however, we saw something a bit different: The combination of more and more simultaneous users logged on to e-conomic, and more and more functionality developed and added to our application caused an overload to certain functions in our system.

Fortunately, we found out about this in time, and no end-users were affected by it. We solved the overload issues by tweaking our server isolation settings a bit, so that each server can handle more tasks at the same time. And of course, we’ve made sure that this won’t cause any overload to the servers themselves!

Going forward, we will keep looking for ways of optimizing our server settings – in addition to our normal procedure of adding servers continually.

As always you can check out the current uptime and performance on our uptime website.

For March, we again exceeded our target of 99.9% uptime, with the e-conomic application up and running for 99.92% of the time during the month.

In the figure below, you can see our day-by-day uptime figures for the month of March:

Uptime for the e-conomic application in January 2012

As the figure shows, we only had three days with less than 100% uptime in March.

On two of these days, the issues went unnoticed by our users, but on March 23 most of the users that were on the system just before lunch (CET) were affected.  We quickly fixed the issue and  got all  users back on 10 minutes later.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this downtime. On the other hand, we’re quite pleased that we were able to fix an issue like this in such a relatively short time.

During the early hours of Sunday April 1, some website visitors reported mysterious events and strange sightings on our websites.

Some were just confused, while others later reported their experience in words like “It’s full of stars!”.

If you happened to experience this mishap, I would like to express my apologies.

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If after reading this post you feel a little embarrassed about your 2+ second page load times for your web pages – fine, you should!

Seriously, there is no excuse for not doing a least the basic speed optimization. It is easy to do and the results are rewarding in terms of better user experience and better conversions.

Most people appreciate crisp and fast websites. Even if they do not notice the speed directly, people will tend to stay longer, read more and come back more often. For online businesses this translates to more income. For content sites, you will probably see more followers and loyal visitors.

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As part of our ongoing sharing of uptime figures for our application, we’re ready with uptime numbers for February. The graph below shows when the e-conomic application has been up and running, and when we’ve experienced short-lived uptime problems.

For February, we reached an average uptime of 99.95%, above the corresponding figure for January and, most importantly, above our stated target of 99.9% uptime.

Uptime figures for the month of February 2012

Why do we share our uptime figures?

As an online software provider, uptime is of course very important to us – and to our customers. We’re making our uptime figures public so everyone, including our customers, can see how well we’re doing and determine for themselves how reliable we are in keeping our application constantly online.

Remember that you’re also always free to check out the latest uptime figures and current uptime status for yourself.

At e-conomic, we’re constantly working to make sure that our service is available to our customers. As part of this we measure uptime – the period of time when the e-conomic application is up and running.

Below you’ll see our uptime for January. On average, we reached 99.927% uptime, above our target of 99.9%.

Uptime for the e-conomic application in January 2012

Contributing factors

One of the main reasons why we can maintain an average of more than 99.9% uptime is our redundant setup. This means that all data is stored and maintained in several locations at once, allowing us to automatically switch sites or servers in case of issues, with minimal or, more likely, no effects to our service.

Also playing a significant role is our alertness to the need for new servers in our system. We have a forecasting procedure in place that tells us when we need to add new servers in order to keep uptime as high as we would like. Over the past month alone, we’ve added six new application servers.

Check out the latest numbers

You can always check out the latest figures and current uptime status of the e-conomic application at uptime.e-conomic.com.

Our Swedish, Norwegian and Finish websites was down this morning from 7.24 to 8.07. The error was located at our Swedish host, and we are still investigating the reason.

All other websites and e-conomic application was not affected, but some of our Swedish, Norwegian and Finish customers would have experienced difficulties logging in to the e-conomic application.

Please be adviced that any e-conomic website can be used as login to e-conomic with your usual credentials, including www.e-conomic.com and www.e-conomic.dk.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this downtime might have caused you.

UPDATE 2011-12-20 11:25: There seems to be some follow up issues with our SE host, resulting in another 7 minutes downtime for SE/NO/FI websites.

SE/NO/FI websites are up again and we are now redirecting to another host to prevent further problems with SE/NO/FI websites.

UPDATE 2011-12-20 11:54: SE/NO/FI websites are now redirected to another host to prevent any further problems accessing these websites.

UPDATE 2011-12-20 17:02: Our SE host have identified the reason for the issues earlier today. The production firewalls had a bug in their firmware. A bug fix is ready and will be applied tonight.

When we are sure we have secure operations again in the SE hosting, we will redirect the SE/NO/FI websites back to the SE hosting.

The Lotus Domino webserver does not care about the trailing slash (“/”) in URLs, leading to Duplicate Content problems which have a negative impact on SEO results. But now there is a safe, fast and elegant solution to this problem using DSAPI filters.

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e-conomic has completed a performance upgrade of its system on Sunday (August 21) from 00:01 to 06:00 CET. This upgrade required the system to be shut down in this period, which means that e-conomic was unavailable to all customers.

Please note that if your integrations to e-conomic do not support post-synchronization of data, any data exchanged with e-conomic in the upgrade period might be lost.

All systems are now back to normal operation and fully available to all customers.

e-conomic is performing an upgrade of its system during a 6-hour time span on Sunday (August 21) from 00:01 to 06:00 CET. Therefore you cannot log on to e-conomic and use the system in this period.

Please note that if your integrations to e-conomic do not support post-synchronization of data, any data exchanged with e-conomic in this period might be lost.

After the 6-hour upgrade, all systems will return to normal operation at 06:00 CET on August 21.