A small community website isn’t critical. If it is unavailable a couple of hours now and then, it may be inconvenient and perhaps frustrating, but certainly not something that will cause its visitors any significant problems.
Now take online banking… That definitely counts as critical. If the website is down, the “online bank office” is effectively shutting out all its users.
We used Pingdom GIGRIB to measure the uptime of 43 US bank websites for two months. The results were very interesting, and you can read about the survey in this IDG News Service article on Computerworld, which is based on the data we collected.
