How stable is your internet banking?

Have you ever thought about how stable the work of Internet banking with which you work? Client-bank becomes the main tool for working with your finances. It doesn’t matter if you manage the money of a huge corporation or work with a personal account. Putting money on deposit, paying for utilities, throwing money on a card, transferring a couple of millions to a partner on the other side of the planet - all this can now be done without leaving the screen.

It is very unpleasant when Internet banking becomes unavailable at the right moment. Even an hour of customer bank malfunction can lead to disastrous consequences. Penalties, late fees, broken contracts - all this may be the result of a temporary unavailability of the client bank.

Online bank is not available

A couple of months ago, a client asked us to provide him with a free Business Package for monitoring websites of banks, promising to provide a report on the work done. The idea was to compare the reliability and availability of online services of large banks. So let's give a word to the client.

Recently decided to check the status of the account in my bank online. And I ran into the situation: when I try to authorize, the page hangs and thinks for a long time. Reloading the page, I still managed, far from the first time, to get into my account. I turned to the online support of the bank site. And, after a long search for my affiliation with the bank’s clients, I learned that there was no official interruption in the work of the site. It is logical that I was intrigued by the question of how things are with the availability of online services of other banks. It seems unforgivable for any large organization, especially payment systems, to limit the availability of their services.
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I chose the 13 largest and most recognizable Russian banks. During his searches on the Internet, he was convinced that the topic, to put it mildly, was not disclosed. There is almost no time information available for users, even (or especially) on the websites of the banks themselves.

Then I decided on my own research of this issue.

How to find the truth?

I put the sites of these banks under surveillance using the HostTracker service, and not only the main pages, but also the client authorization pages of online banking. I note that HostTracker allows for any Internet resources to monitor from different geographically distant points, determine the non-working time intervals and keep statistics on the inaccessibility of site pages.

On the service page I set up a quick check of the site's performance:

• interval between tests: 1 minute
• HTTP method: GET
• Timeout: 7 seconds - the site is unavailable if it is not loaded within the specified time.
• Selection of regions from which monitoring occurs: Asia, Europe (20 points in total).



Online statistics for the required period of time can be viewed on the widget . Charts in real time and dynamics display the availability statistics of selected banks. In addition, with the help of the widget, you can always insert a link to the result in a comment, profile on the forums or your page, adding just a few lines of code.

Then everyone will be able to move the cursor to find out the details of the work of the bank’s site, including the time and duration of its services being unavailable.

I would like to pay tribute to the banks, the availability of which has been tested: most of them provide continuous access to their online services.

It is clear that the availability of the Internet banking site is only one of the components of the stability of the distant service system. But based on this information, conclusions can be drawn about the general approach to stability and reliability in a particular bank.
Recall that we recently wrote about how to use accessibility graphics on your sites .