Keynote Systems, a company that specialises in assessing the performance and availability of websites, has revealed that a number of well known UK-based online bookmakers experienced significant performance problems during the opening weekend of the FIFA World Cup.
According to Keynote, the website of leading online betting exchange Betfair was down for a total of 23 minutes during the opening match of the FIFA World Cup on Friday 9 June. This included three minutes before half-time, the whole of half-time and one minute of the second half.
Sportingbet-owned sites Sporting Odds and BetUK also experienced several problems. Sporting Odds was unavailable on 10 June during two matches and on the morning of 9 June BetUKs homepage was taking 40 seconds to load, before returning to its normal load time of four seconds after 9.30am. But BetUK also struggled on Saturday and was unavailable from 4.50pm until the early hours of Sunday morning.
Haran Sold, managing director of EMEA for Keynote Systems, said: "Operators will test their infrastructure internally and stress-test their systems in a conventional way, but that does not replicate how the traffic flows to their sites in real-time situations. When users are accessing a site from all over the web, processing the information can be much more complicated."
Sold added that the World Cup was a massive marketing opportunity for operators and with competition being so fierce it was critical "they don't fall foul of increased demand or technical glitches which can rear their head at busy periods".
A spokesperson for Betfair told eGaming Review: "It was an unfortunate event but we are not overly worried about it. We experienced higher traffic levels during England-Paraguay and Italy-Ghana and our site has coped with the load. We are therefore confident our infrastructure will hold up for the remainder of the competition."
Keynote has an infrastructure of more than1,600 measurement computers and mobile devices in more than 114 locations worldwide. The company tests service levels such as site responsiveness and reliability, load capacity and application behaviour in real time, and has a panel of more than 160,000 consumers who participate in interactive site tests.
During the opening week of the World Cup, the following UK sites have topped the poll on internet performance measured on loading times and availability (Statistics measured from 8am on 9 June 2006 to 8pm on 15 June 2006):
1 Coral
2 Totesport
3 Victor Chandler
3 Bet 365
5 William Hill
6 Betfred
7 Bluesquare
8 Betfair
9 Paddy Power
10 Skybet
source : egr magazine
