Can uptime be misleading?

Question

I'm writing an article about golf management software companies and their uptime and incidents. One company has over 2 years of history and their uptime is perfect and they have had zero incidents and zero scheduled maintenance.

Is it likely they don't maintain the page? If the answer is yes, couldn't a company create a statuspage, make sure it never shows an issue and then market themselves as having 100% uptime with a clickthrough to their live statuspage, as a way to "prove" their uptime?

Mike Hendrix · Answer

Thanks for the info. I included it here: https://www.golfcoursetechnologyreviews.org/blog/importance-of-status-pages-for-golf-course-operators

Jesse Klein · Answer

Hello Mike,

This is Jesse from the Statuspage support team. Welcome to the community. You pose an interesting question about how our customers use Statuspage.

There are a few different options that we typically see:

* The company isn't utilizing its page fully
* The company doesn't have anything meaningful to share that they consider "downtime" or a "degraded experience." This is a common practice. Companies will have a threshold of what they consider important enough to share.
* They happen to have excellent uptime with nothing to report.
* They utilize private pages to deal with internal communication and only use their public pages when something is really dire.

A big part of what Statuspage does is enable incident communication, but in the end, it's up to the company to decide what communication they want to convey to their customers. While a company could abandon its page or manipulate it to look like they are perfect, users will eventually figure it out and lose trust in the company. I personally would caution against whether a company is maliciously trying to manipulate that data since they would be outed pretty quickly.

Also, in terms of "proving" their uptime, Statuspage isn't a monitoring tool. It would not be effective or accurate enough for uptime service level agreements and we don't recommend using Statuspage if uptime is part of your contract.

Hopefully, that adds a little context to how companies use the tool and I hope that is helpful for your article.

Regards,
Jesse