You know. Sometimes !@#$ happens to websites which causes them to go offline. Some websites are hosted on crappy oversold servers that go down a few times a day, and some are hosted on geographically isolated clusters that guarantee availability. Achieving the four nine’s — 99.99% availability — can be very costly, so the question ought to be asked is, how much does downtime cost a website?

For OzBargainBlog, it worked out to be around 35 cents per hour of lost opportunity to bombard visitors with more advert banners (yes I know it is pathetic). For a large online retailer, it can be a massive lost of business opportunity that costs tens or hundreds thousands dollars. Worse, 9 out 10 consumers will go to the competitors if your website is down so you loose the returning purchases as well!

No wonder Deals Direct, one of the top online retailer in Australia, is so eager to have their websites fixed as it went offline on Wednesday, that they are giving away a 8% discount coupon and adding more discount each hour their site is down, taken from their IT Team’s pay packets.

Fortunately (or unfortunately?) Deals Direct’s site came back online at around 8:30pm so the maximum discount is only 8%. Use the following code when you shop at Deals Direct to claim your discount, funded by the poor engineers in the server room.

8PERCENT

Now, whether the website is really offline, or whether it is just their latest buzz-making strategy — I have no idea. However I doubt you can really deduct wages from your employee’s pay packet this way (but I could be very wrong). Anyway, what really matter is that there is a new Deals Direct discount coupon, valid until 10 August 2007.

By the way, I only found out about the deal at around 9pm and the site was already back online. I wonder why there was not anyone contacting their Russian mafia friends to perform some distributed Denial of Service attack on the website to make sure that it stays down until 12. Just kidding :)