

Ask HN: Should You Publicly Post Uptime Stats for a SaaS site? - apinstein

I have gotten burned a lot lately by vendors whose sites go down too much. It's pretty much impossible to tell a priori how good a site's uptime is, and I wish people posted their uptime charts. I thought about instituting a policy of only using vendors that do this, but frankly I can't find any that do.<p>I run a few SaaS sites, and am wondering if I should eat my own transparency dog food and post our own uptime stats...<p>Thoughts?
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timf
As a consumer, SaaS sites that post information like this (that I find
credible) definitely influence my buying decision (I don't have anything to
say to you as a SaaS site owner yet).

Check this site out, it has a lot to say on this subject (and good examples in
their 'hall of fame'):

<http://www.transparentuptime.com>

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apinstein
Wow, that's a cool site. I didn't find it in my initial research. Thanks!

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callmeed
I could be wrong, but I'm inclined to think it's only helpful for SaaS apps
serving geeks/hackers.

If you're serving Joe Consumer or a specific industry/niche market, I'm not
sure it matters.

I do like it when my service providers have a "system status" page, so maybe
that's an option.

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apinstein
I don't think it matters whether the customer is a geek; rather it matters
only if the service is "mission-critical" for the customer.

For instance, our apps serve niche business customers (photographers,
realtors). We get questions about uptime from only about 1-2% of realtors for
the website tool app, but probably 10-20% of photographers. This jives with
"only matters when it's infrastructure" as mentioned above. We are the
deliverable for the photographers...

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callmeed
Makes sense. We serve photographers primarily too–and yes, they tend to care
about uptime quite a bit.

We don't publish uptime stats, but we do work our butts off to have a good
reputation in general. In my experience, photographers rely heavily on the
recommendation (good or bad) of other photographers. I'd say don't publish
uptime data but give a general outline of your server/data
center/reliability/backup procedures and why they're awesome. Treat the
customers you have like gold and they'll recommend you in forums, blogs, etc.

