When you rely on Software as a Service (SaaS) you need confidence that the provider of that service is competent and can prove consistent availability and scalability. With thousands of organisations across the world relying on our services, we are continuously investing in our hosted infrastructure.

So how do we achieve 100% uptime – we’ve had no outages, no partial outages, no degraded performance – in two years? A few basics: stay humble, plan ahead, constantly monitor, keep building team skill and knowledge, implement the very best technologies and practices – invest in the right tools and rigorously test.

What are some of the practices that are delivering outstanding levels of uptime second by second, building to year by year? Our network is optimised so that thousands of simultaneous requests for (say) address validation can be processed with users receiving immediate responses. This is called low latency.

When there are spikes and increases in demand for our services, we are ready to respond instantly with increased capacity. We achieve this by enabling our hosted services to automatically enlarge – which is known as lightweight virtualisation technology. These extra resources are deployed quickly, reliably, and consistently. We also anticipate that faults happen and use additional machines which allow connections to still be made available if another machine fails (“Quorum Nodes”), to improve resiliency and fault tolerance. AFD continues to invest heavily in technologies that deliver maximum speed, reliability, and availability.

While we have maintained a 100% uptime track record for the past two years, we understand that technology can sometimes be unpredictable, and unexpected challenges may arise. Do we want to maintain 100%? Yes! That’s why our quest for excellence is never over – our dedicated teams will continue to use best practice, available technologies and ongoing testing to maintain the highest levels of service. In summary – we care, we invest, we want to be the best. Our goal is simple. Happy Customers.