Poll highlights concerns over new website technologies

A poll conducted by NetBenefit has revealed that 74% of respondents are concerned that adding new technologies to their websites will slow down performance but over half of those polled (52%) are not changing their hosting requirements to meet the growing demands.
 
The survey, which was carried out amongst delegates at the recent E-Commerce Expo in London, asked respondents a series of questions about their websites. Whilst 52% revealed that their companies are doing at least half their business online, a worrying 80% of those asked confirmed they had experienced downtime in the last 12 months.
 
Commenting on the findings of the research, Jonathan Robinson, COO at NetBenefit, says: "only 3 out of 5 of those surveyed were confident that they had the right levels of redundancy in their hosting platform to guarantee uptime. Businesses are still slow to see the connection between brand and revenue protection and a truly robust managed hosting platform that can provide guaranteed uptime backed up by 24x7 support.
 
"As online applications such as wikis, RSS feeds, podcasts, and webinars, become more mainstream, everyone's getting excited about the opportunity to make their websites increasingly interactive. However, it doesn't matter how well designed and clever your site is - if it's not reliable and robust enough to manage all these new applications then it's an empty investment.
 
"Usability does not stop with content, design and navigation. If the website is slow to respond or crashes then visitors will go elsewhere. If businesses don't stop to consider the managed hosting requirements that underpin their online presence they are likely to end up with an expensive website that has little traffic and a poor reputation."