It's Uptime!

This week the Marketing Sherpa published a few pieces on surveying. Some good pieces but one criteria that they forgot to mention is uptime. I was reminded of uptime recently when I received an email from one of our competitors explaining to their customers that they'd be taking their servers down for maintenance. Any surveys on their system will be unavailable during this time.

To me, this is a cardinal sin in software development. Any one who knows me knows that I'm all about the user and planned outages for maintenance are unacceptable in my book. The ultimate user inconvenience. We cannot know when a survey participant will respond to our surveys so they need to be available ALL THE TIME! Otherwise, we are undoubtedly losing an opportunity to collect data as we cannot assume that someone will take time to fill out the survey later. In this day and age, there is no excuse for "planned" outages.

At Beeliner, redundancy is a good word..as in "our servers are redundant" not, "Amanda, you already said that. You're being redundant." We never make our service unavailable due to maintenance since we have a team of servers. We take one down at a time and the others cover for the server that is being upgrading. This makes me appreciate the time and care that was put into the construction of our systems. Thanks Heiko and the tech team!