As the peak days for the holiday shopping seasons approach quickly, 33 percent of the top retail websites based in the US are “not ready” for the holiday season,

according to a report by website performance monitoring service Uptrends.

In a press release announcing the results,Uptrends described the methodology for the study,which examined the performance for the home pages of 1640 of the most

popular e-commerce websites, including the top 1,000 websites listed by research group Online Retailer during the 31-day period ranging from October 14, 2012 to

November 14, 2012. Uptrends says it conducted the monitoring from more than 100 checkpoints located around the world, at intervals of 5 minutes.

While promoting its own performance monitoring services was an obvious angle for Uptrends in producing the report, the results paint a somewhat surprising picture of

reliability among the sites that stand to lose the most from outages during the enormous spike in holiday shopping traffic seen on “black Friday” and “cyber Monday.”

The study shows that even the sites on the list, which should have the volume, the financial incentive and the resources to ensure that their websites remain online to serve

customers, even they are struggling with performance issues. For hosting customers, whose customers are in many cases less prepared to handle the holiday season, the

issue could be more severe.

A chart of performance for the least reliable 25 websites among those studied is included in the press release announcing the survey results, on the company’s website.

Average uptime for the entire group was 99.72 percent during the monitoring period, says Uptrends, which translates to 2 hours, 8 minutes of downtime. The average for the

25 least accessible of the sites was 92.25 percent, which represents downtime of 57 hours, 25 minutes during the monitoring period.

For hosting providers, the study’s results could be a helpful tool in selling monitoring services of their own, or other tools (CDN services, load balancing, extra capacity) that

might improve site performance, to their e-commerce hosting customers in the few days leading up to the big holiday shopping days.

In October, Rackspace released a similarly-themed study on the preparedness of e-commerce retailers for the holiday season, in this case, asking the operators of online

shops about their plans for handling the spike in traffic.

“We consider 99.90% uptime to be the minimum required for web shops,” says Jim Jaworski, director of North American operations for Uptrends, quoted in the press

release. “If your online store is not available, the (potential) customer will do their shopping somewhere else, which will result in the loss of revenue and the reputation of

your company.”

Jawarski added that the Uptrends monitoring tools could provide retailers with information about performance and availability, giving them the tools to react to a potential

outage.