Maybe I’m wrong; sorry… so let me rephrase “There should be admin cover to avoid such issue…”
If it’s been down for three days that might suggest a pretty serious/fundamental issue, rather than something that just requires some administrative support. Agreed that it’s a long time to be down, though.
Not if you have no idea how to fix it….. and now it’s le weekend, so we’re all off home
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ATB, J
Fair point 
Has it been down for that long or was the comment including this weekend if no one can address until Monday?
Not sure, tbh. I was just going by the comment made.
I think Naim are still small enough for certain things to have staff single points of failure. I know having just one person with critical knowledge would be unforgivable for a large organization but at their size, it’s going to be pretty common for SPOFs on peripheral non core tasks.
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As long as the forum isn’t down
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I would not classify website availability as a “peripheral non core task”… NaimAudio.com has 185K visits per month according to Similarweb, so over 6,000 visits per day; that’s a lot of disappointed customers/distributors… It really doesn’t reflect well on Naim as a tech company having a website down for 3 days… If VerVent Audio isn’t big enough to have 7-day a week in-house tech support, then 24/7 web monitoring and support can and should be contracted out… I had external 7-day a week 8am-8pm tech support in business with just £10m annual turnover and any website outage was dealt within an hour. I appreciate this may be out of Naim’s control but VerVent Audio should take note of this serious outage… sorry…
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Anything you can live without for a few days without the business suffering major financial loss is non mission critical.
When most businesses assess their mission critical functions that need resiliencey and redundancy, the number of functions they can’t do without for a few days is often very limited.
For example, banks classify almost nothing in their consumer banking services like ATMs or mobile payments as mission critical (I’ve been in some pretty cynical policy meetings). Critical to private customers perhaps but not the bank as a whole. Similarly, unless you are an online retailer or a publisher of reference material used by a whole industry on a constant basis, very few websites are critical to the extent they may devastate the business if down for a few days.
The business may not suffer “major financial loss” in the short term but a 3-day web outage will seriously damage Naim’s reputation as a tech company. Naim supplies streamers and customers/distributors expect good online services and IT security by default. While long term financial loss is impossible to predict, I’m sure it will be higher than having 7-day a week IT support in place…
I’m not saying it isn’t embarrassing or shameful.
But given the size of company, they have to make decisions on whether it is worth another £70k a year to double up on the person and resources needed to avoid a week’s outage.
You play the odds and put the cost for resiliency where you think it matters most. And sometimes you lose.
I doubt there will be serious reputation impact. Though I doubt someone will be getting a promotion or bonus anytime soon, assuming they keep their job.
Many businesses, small and large, outsource website management to professional web service companies, and just have a handful of people able to add simple content. That would seem far preferable to having just one person controlling the site, IF that is the situation behind Richard’s note - it might not be as that could mean Richard just has the one contact, not just one person involved.
It might not be mission critical, but when a website is down for several days without a placeholder saying something like down for maintenance, the first thing in some people’s minds will be has the business itself gone down?
This did briefly occur to me. One puzzlement for me is that the website remains inaccessible yet the forum can be accessed directly. Isn’t it just a component of the website? Or is it an entirely separate entity as this situation seems to imply?
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Separate. The forums is a subdomain pointing to a third party provider of forums.
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Blimey - there are a lot of assumptions being made in the thread. Too many , I’d have thought.
My comment was because in my experience a website going down is often the first indication customers get that a business has gone under. Not an assumption I have made in this case, but an assumption some people attempting to visit the Naim site might make if they try over two or three days.
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The forum is quite separate to the website with a different host, server etc.. and also different admin of course.
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These things happen, far more important is the Forum 
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