Yesterday you were supposed to get an email from me asking you to take our big annual reader survey.
Just 30-seconds before it was due to go out, I checked the hotlink one last time to make sure it worked. It didn't. The survey site was down.
Arrgh! If you rely on ASPs such as online survey tools, broadcast email services, campaign metrics tools, ad serving tech, etc. you are utterly at the mercy of Somebody Else's Server.
I asked our Tech Editor Alexis, "What questions about reliability should a marketer ask an ASP before picking them?" She told me, "What is your uptime guarantee to me as a customer? What are the penalties if you don't meet it?"
"If you get a 99% uptime promise then your ASP can be down more than 7 hours per month. If you get 99.9% it's 43 minutes per month. 99.99% is less than five minutes per month - which is what everybody thinks they are getting but most ASPs couldn't afford to pay for the redundancies that would require."
I have terrible link kharma, so even at just 43 minutes per month, they will always be the Worst Possible 43 Minutes.
