Bookies stand firm against attacks and user demand

The UK's raft of online bookies are performing well despite the twin pressures of extortion gangs threatening denial of service attacks and a bet-mad public throwing their hard-earned cash behind Wayne Rooney and the England football team.

silicon.com gave web monitoring firm Empirix a list of leading bookmakers' websites to test and the research revealed most were coping with large volumes of traffic during the first week of Euro 2004 - but there are some which would definitely receive a report stating 'could do better'.

William Hill performed best in terms of homepage availability (100 per cent) and the speed the site took to access (0.58 second average over a broadband connection). Tote Sport was actually the fastest on average (0.33 seconds) but couldn't deliver 100 per cent availability during the test period of 11 to 18 June.

Betting exchange Betfair was the second best performing site - also with 100 per cent reliability and an average download time of 0.79 seconds.

David Yu, CTO of Betfair, told silicon.com that site availability is paramount, "especially in betting".

He said: "Uptime is something we monitor constantly and in the build-up to major events we will do everything to keep even planned downtime, for maintenance, to a minimum."

Yu said he has no doubts that a punter who couldn't access their site quickly at the first time trying may well take their business elsewhere - especially if they are involved in the very time-sensitive practice of in-game betting - changing, modifying or laying off bets during the running of the event.

Yu also believes timing is everything and sites which want to succeed can no longer be slow-coaches.

"We spend a lot of time perfecting the time it takes to access our sites."

In these days of widespread broadband usage Yu said consumers now expect immediate results and won't tolerate lengthy waits for a page to download.

Originally it was feared many internet bookies would be targeted around the start of Euro 2004 by organised gangs - often with a 'pay up or we'll bring your website down' type threat.

However, to date it seems likely the sites are struggling with nothing more problematic than high demand from punters - which as many will tell you is a great problem to have.

Ladbrokes customers may have experienced the worst problems during the past week, according to the Empirix research. The site only managed 95.79 per cent availability and actually experienced a dip to an average of 77.8 per cent during the 24 hour period leading up to the England v France game.

Sporting Index on the other hand, while available 100 per cent of the time, did keep punt-hungry England fans waiting for 5.9 seconds on average prior to kick-off in that particular match and a pedestrian 6.9 seconds on average for the whole of the test period. The fastest by far during the peak pre-match period was Tote Sport (average 0.18 seconds).

Other websites which failed to hit the ideal 100 per cent availability during the test period included Blue Square (98.74 per cent) which had been the victim of an extortion gang leading up to the tournament. Coral (98.95), Sporting Bet (98.32) and Tote Sport (99.58) also fell short of the 100 per cent mark.