37signals Network Uptime

37signals has published its New Years resolution to have 100% uptime for its key product, Basecamp.  Basecamp provides tools as an online subscription based service to help businesses, both small and large, to manage their projects and let team members collaborate to deliver results.  With the provision of storage for centralized documents and files, task and milestone management, writeboards for communications, amongst many other features, signed up businesses very quickly become reliant on the availability of Basecamp and any down time, whether scheduled or unscheduled can have critical impact on a company when it means that the team members don’t have access when they need it!

So how do we define uptime?  It’s the period of time when the application is up and running and accessible by its customers.

As part of their resolution for 100% uptime, 37signals is publishing a monthly uptime clock to keep its customers informed.  100% is a mighty challenge for the team at 37signals to lay down to itself – of course, with a continuously evolving application, new functionality needs to be delivered and this will mean upgrades on the Basecamp servers, so there will be those rare times when the application has to be down for short periods of time for essential maintenance and upgrades but these will be limited to the bare minimum.

The company that manages the 37signals network provision has published figures for their 4 key products for the last 12 months, and those figures look good:

• Basecamp: 99.93% – which equates to approximately 6 hours of down time
• Highrise: 99.95%  – which equates to approximately 4 hours of down time
• Campfire: 99.95%  – which equates to approximately 4 hours of down time
• Backpack: 99.98%  – which equates to less than 2 hours of down time

About Basecamp

Bascamp offers online, collaborative project management functionality helping both co-located and distributed teams to work in a collaborative way on a central source of project-related information.  With its colorful and customizable interface, the application is easy to use and team members can be up and running with little or no training requirement to get them going.

Basecamp offers different levels of subscription with something to suit most needs irrespective of company size.  With it’s sister products, Highrise (contact management), Campfire (online chatrooms) and Backpack (internal communications) the suite of 37signals applications offers an integrated business and project management solution.

Basecamp offers a 1 month free trial that gives full access to all the features offered and is well worth a try.