Activityinfo.org reaches 99.99% Availability

Introduction

Over the past six months, bedatadriven has invested in improving the availability of_ Activityinfo.org_. ActivityInfo is 'available' when the user community can submit new data, update work or create reports and GIS maps. The term 'unavailable' is used when a user cannot access Activityinfo.org.

To increase the availability of the Activityinfo.org service, we migrated to Google App Engine in early 2013, which has provided the Activityinfo.org environment with greater stability. In addition, to handle the increasing number of new users, we've  optimized the ActivityInfo software, ensuring existing users are not adversely affected as demand for the Activityinfo.org service grows.

Graph showing visits per month to activityinfo.org April 2011 - January 2013

The investment is paying off...

Statistics from Pingdom, our external monitoring service, show that ActivityInfo has reached “Four Nines” (99.99%) in February 2013, indicating that the Activityinfo.org service is almost continually available to users, with less than 5 minutes downtime in any month (the term 'downtime' is used to refer to periods when a system is unavailable).

Always another challenge...

Whilst ActivityInfo had a stellar February, on Sunday morning we were down 35 minutes. A technical error by Cloudflare (an internet service Activityinfo.org uses to speed up the site and prevent spam and attacks) caused the outage and affected hundreds of thousands of websites in addition to ActivityInfo.

Uptime Graph 01/03/2013 - 04/03/2013, showing the outage caused by Cloudflare

In light of this outage, we are re-evaluating the use of Cloudflare and considering alternative providers, to avoid similar problems in the future.