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How Dependable is Internet?
by Bruce Gingery
(Note: As our lives come to depend more and more on Internet, we need to take stock of of the fact as to how dependable is this new medium? Not only that we must insist from our ISPs that they leave no stone unturned to make it so.-- Raj Mehta)
In a world electronic economy, reachability is an (perhaps false)
indicator of reliability. Whenever a website is unreachable,
to the world, it no longer exists. When properly addressed E-Mail is
undeliverable, the business or person who is the addressee no longer
exists - perhaps has gone out of business.
While this may not seem fair, it is a reality for the new century.
E-mail which is undeliverable for four hours will generally at least
cause a notification to the sender that it could not be delivered.
While not all services provide such notifications, if you are the
one who is not getting the E-Mail, you may assume that your correspondants
have been notified. If the message was flagged as extra-important (high
priority), that notification time may be reduced to 15 minutes or an
hour.
When your web visitors and clients can reach other websites, but not yours,
no matter where or why that outage exists, your perceived
reliability has decreased. Unfortunately, some web browsers make little
distinction between not being able to find the address of a
website (DNS lookup), and not being able to contact the site
for which the address has been successfully looked up.
Having an attractive low-impact (small files added together to make the
display) webpage can help with a slow network. From a marketing
standpoint, whether your message is social, business, or even governmental,
once the person knows they can get a page from you, they can be more tolerant
of varied net speeds, and wait with just a bit more patience for additional
items, but if they decide you don't exist, patience may be
fleeting.
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