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164 Part 1 Introduction

Table 3.5 Variation in download speed (for a 56.6 kbps modem) and page size for the
top five and bottom five UK sites week starting 6 October 2005

Web site Average download speed Page size
1 Thomas Cook 4.65 s 18.46 kb
2 British Airways 5.15 s 23.46 kb
3 Next On-Line Shopping 5.64 s 26.90 kb
4 easyJet 6.09 s 27.88 kb
5 NTL 6.66 s 29.77 kb
95 Nokia UK 37.60 s 180.98 kb
96 The Salvation Army 37.68 s 171.07 kb
97 Rail Track 38.14 s 111.00 kb
98 workthing.com 38.77 s 187.35 kb
99 Orange 40.01 s 194.16 kb
100 FT.com 44.39 s 211.55 kb

Source: Site Confidence (www.siteconfidence.co.uk)

A major factor for a company to consider when choosing an ISP is whether the server is dedi-
cated to one company or whether content from several companies is located on the same
server. A dedicated server is best, but it will attract a premium price.

Availability
The availability of a web site is an indication of how easy it is for a user to connect to it. In
theory this figure should be 100 per cent, but sometimes, for technical reasons such as fail-
ures in the server hardware or upgrades to software, the figure can drop substantially below
this. Box 3.8 illustrates some of the potential problems and how companies can evaluate and
address them.

Box 3.8 Preventing wobbly shopping carts

The extent of the problem of e-commerce service levels was indicated by The Register
(2004) in an article titled ‘Wobbly shopping carts blight UK e-commerce’. The research
showed that failure of transactions once customers have decided to buy is often a
problem. As the article said, ‘UK E-commerce sites are slapping customers in the face,
rather than shaking them by the hand. Turning consumers away once they have made
a decision to buy is commercial suicide.’ The research showed this level of problems:
(ix) 20% of shopping carts did not function for 12 hours a month or more.
(x) 75% failed the standard service level availability of 99.9% uptime.
(xi) 80% performed inconsistently with widely varying response times, time-outs and
errors – leaving customers at best wondering what to do next and at worst unable
to complete their purchases.
Similarly, SciVisum, a web testing specialist found that three-quarters of Internet
marketing campaigns are impacted by web site failures, with 14 per cent of failures so
severe that they prevented the campaign meeting its objectives. The company