System performance and uptime are critical to end users, but it’s often not communicated clearly — especially when a customer first signs up for the software.
When you’re purchasing new software, you should know exactly how reliable it is.
What is uptime?
Uptime is the time that a website or application is available in a given period. It’s presented as a ratio of time available divided by total time.
For example, a website may have 99.9% uptime. This allows for 43 minutes and 49 seconds of downtime per month.
Uptime accounts for planned outages, as well as those that are unplanned.
What is considered high system uptime?
In a perfect world, every site would maintain 100% uptime. But this is nearly impossible. A gold standard is 99.999% uptime, which is often called “five nines.”
In the cannabis industry, achieving five nines consistently isn’t realistic. There are too many moving parts in this young and fast-changing industry (Metrc, printing services, reliance on third parties, etc.). But constantly striving toward ambitious goals is what eventually leads to success.
Regardless, transparency is important. As is allowing your software users an easy way to find your uptime statistics and view service interruption and resolution details.
If you’re shopping for software, always look for a status page and ask questions about site reliability.
It's important to note that uptime can be impacted by planned outages for site updates or maintenance. Planned outages often occur at times when few people are using the site, so there is little to no impact on users.
Flowhub uptime and site reliability
Here’s how Flowhub performed for uptime in March 2021.
In order to provide customers with the utmost transparency, Flowhub has released a public Status Page.
Visit the status page to:
- Find answers to any questions related to Flowhub’s service status.
- See historical information that explains previous incidents, as well as how and when they were resolved.
- Sign up to receive text or email notifications regarding service interruptions and resolutions.
If you're interested in learning more about how Flowhub keeps your cannabis dispensary running and protects your data, read this post.
