June, July Worst Months for Uptime

Is downtime a seasonal event? New data from the web site monitoring service Pingdom suggests there may be a correlation. Pingdom used monitoring data from more than 2,000 websites to compile a six-month overview of the average website downtime per month. The result? The sites had 139 total minutes of downtime in June, with July coming next at 130 minutes.

So why would downtime be worse in June and July? Pingdom offers some speculation:

Another possible cause might be rolling brownouts from local utilities as consumer power usage rises in the summer months, especially since so many leading web sites are hosted in California. I'd be surprised if June were the statistical peak season for utility brownouts, however. But at least someone thinks brownouts are closely tied to uptime. If you Google "rolling brownouts frequency", three of the top four results are companies selling UPS equipment.