How Stable & Reliable Is Member Jungle?

How reliable something is is incredibly important, especially the more trust you are putting in it. You might trust one of those little inflatable pool toys to relax on in a swimming pool, but if you were crossing the North Sea, chances are you’d want something a bit more reliable. 

 

 

Well, the same is true for membership management systems. If you have hundreds or thousands of members, run events, and process payments for tickets, memberships, merchandise, and more, you can’t afford to have a system that is constantly breaking down, not working, and falling apart.

So, with that in mind and in the spirit of always being open and honest, let’s look at what causes websites to have issues and how stable and reliable Member Jungle is.  

Top 5 Reasons For Website Downtime

1. Server Issues

Websites like the ones Member Jungle hosts live on computer servers. These are massive computers designed to run constantly and host multiple websites. A server can have an issue for multiple reasons, but one of the most common is that they get too hot. Servers kick out a lot of heat and need to be kept in very cold air-conditioned rooms, lest they fry themselves worse than an English tourist on the beach. 

 

 

So, any issues with the aircon or power supply can lead to outages. At Member Jungle, we have redundancies in place. If one server goes down, a backup server will be activated, meaning your website will be restored almost instantly.

2. Network Problems

A good, fast internet connection is very important; I'm sure you all remember the early days of YouTube, where you'd click on a video, then go make yourself a cup of coffee, do a crossword, and have a nap while you waited for the two-minute video to buffer enough to actually watch. If you are too young to remember the dread of watching the red bar slowly catch up to the grey buffer bar, honestly, go away from me.

 

 

Just like you need good, fast internet to watch videos, you need a good internet connection for your website. If something breaks along the way, the website can disappear. If this network issue is outside of our control, then there really isn't anything we can do to help. However, if it is in our control, we can switch your website over to another connection to keep it accessible.

3. Too Much Traffic

Another potential reason for your website to go down is if it receives too much traffic. Similar to a shop with limited floor space, registers, and staff to manage the number of customers, your website has its own limits regarding how much traffic its infrastructure can handle. If too many people visit a website at the same time, it might slow down or crash.

Our infrastructure is built to handle huge amounts of unexpected traffic. Still, there can be times when the amount of traffic is overwhelming. In these cases, we can quickly scale our servers to handle more traffic.

4. Software Or Code Errors

Websites operate on code, and if there is a mistake in that code, it can lead to issues that cause the site to malfunction. We thoroughly test all our product updates before releasing them to our customers. However, there are occasions when a bug might slip through our testing process, resulting in problems. Although this is rare, our team works swiftly to fix any bugs to minimise the impact on our customers.

5. Cyber Attacks

Unfortunately, sometimes, people will attempt to break websites by flooding them with fake traffic or hacking into them. To combat these bad actors, we employ multiple layers of defence, including firewalls and intrusion prevention systems, to help protect our customers' data. 

For more information about this, please check out How does Member Jungle protect your data?

So, now that we know what causes websites to go down and have issues, let’s look at how much this affects Member Jungle. 

How Reliable Is The Member Jungle System?

The industry standard for companies that offer web hosting and software as a service (SaaS) is to guarantee 99.9% uptime per month. This means these systems will have no more than approximately 44 minutes of downtime each month. Over an entire year, this totals just over eight hours of downtime, which is quite good. If you knew someone who only took eight hours off work in a year, you’d plan an intervention before they died of exhaustion. 

Member Jungle aims to provide uptime that exceeds the industry standard, targeting an uptime of 99.99%. So, does Member Jungle actually reach this goal? Well yes. Member Jungle has an average uptime of 99.998%, which equals 53 seconds of downtime a month, and 10 minutes of downtime a year. If you knew someone who only took 10 minutes off a year, it would be too late to plan an intervention; they would already be dead. 

 

 

Even when you include scheduled outages for upgrades to the system, Member Jungle still averages 99.96% uptime, higher than the industry standard.  

So to summarise, the industry standard is 44 minutes of downtime a month, Member Jungle’s downtime, including scheduled outages and maintenance, is 17 minutes a month, and Member Jungle averages less than one minute of unplanned downtime a month. 

Basically, Member Jungle is always up and running, and in the very rare cases that it does go down, it will be back before the average person even notices.

More Information On Data Security At Member Jungle

If you are looking for more information about how secure Member Jungle is and how we keep your data safe, read How does Member Jungle protect your data?

For even more information, watch this video: Member Jungle CEO on Data Security: Peace of Mind for Your Club.