Why on-premise device detection rules
What happened?
Faults with Microsoft Azure have caused downtime for many websites, including their own X-Box Live, Office 365 and MSN services. 51Degrees was also affected. The site was unavailable for a period of time earlier today.
What was the impact?
51Degrees might have gone offline for a while, but only 2 of our clients even noticed something was wrong. The auto-update displayed some timeout messages on their logs, that was it. This is the real-life example of how on-site detection is superior to cloud-based services. Had the service been cloud based, many websites would not be able to identify mobile devices and as a result a lot of mobile customers would end up using the wrong website version, leading to a poor user experience, badly positioned ads and so on.
In a world of cloud services you have to accept the risk of downtime, this technology is still in its infancy after all. The standard promised uptime of 99.99% translates in to 0.88 days of downtime per year. If this was to happen during a busy holiday season, even a few hours of device detection downtime could translate in to a hefty loss in sales revenue.
Using on-site device detection offered by 51Degrees allows you to avoid the pitfalls of cloud-based device detection. Even if this outage was to last over a day, the quality of 51Degrees device detection solution would not suffer.