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

5 points by apinstein ↗ HN
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.

I run a few SaaS sites, and am wondering if I should eat my own transparency dog food and post our own uptime stats...

Thoughts?

6 comments

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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

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
apinstein
Wow, that's a cool site. I didn't find it in my initial research. Thanks!
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.

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...

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.