Yes! I agree what you say. I know it is the best Single hot plate guide?…

You make some good points. There’s no question that a shopping cart is significantly more mission-critical than an analytics application. But I don’t think that warrants writing off the incident as a non issue. If analytics were unimportant, there wouldn’t be such a compelling business case for applications like HitBox and HBX. If you’re the marketer responsible for reporting on the effectiveness of a major campaign–not to mention justifying the monthly budget for the application–a significant outage like this at the wrong time simply sucks.

You’re absolutely right–WebSideStory has been very reputable, and one of the pioneers of online analytics. That’s what makes this incident troubling. When a firm of their caliber takes such a signficant hit–and its support systems appear to be in disarray in responding to the problem–it’s disconcerting.

Granted, it’s not the same as losing revenue, but I don’t think that gives them a bye on this.

1. Only 10% of businesses online today utilize an enterprise caliber on-demand analytics application - so even the online world as a whole does not see it as a mission-critical app.

2. If a commerce site’s shopping cart doesn’t function, they lose money, i.e. cart=mission critical. Access to an analytics UI go down for an hour, with NO data loss,….is this the failure of a mission critical app?

3. VP’s of Marketing rarely look at web analytics on a daily basis, unless they are at a start-up. Most companies have managers and analysts that look at the numbers and DO generate daily reports for VP’s, though in reality, how often do the VP’s look at them? …and keep in mind, only 10% of business online are even doing this.

4. WebSideStory has been, actually, very reputable in terms of uptime. I believe SEMPhonic was the latest firm to tout this in their report released last summer, ‘HBX vs. SiteCatalyst’

5. Mike’s company, HubStop.com has no enterprise on-demand analytics implemented at this time, per their source code, not even free google.

Web analytics is not mission critical? Well to the VP of marketing it is certainly mission critical. Your story about the new product launch hitting at the same time you had no analytics highlights that.

Hopefully this will be a lesson for WebSideStory and they will use it as an opportunity to improve.

PS - I fully believe in hosted services (my company sells a hosted service!) and think they usually provide more uptime than applications that companies buy and run themselves. The difference is just that it is more public when hosted services fail and you have to yell at your vendor, not your VP of IT.