We often talk to customers and prospects about 3rd part code or content on their website.  Whether it's like the Sitemeter product mentioned below or it's a 3rd party company hosting some of their content or simply a link to a 3rd party site when things go wrong it can go disastrously wrong.

Imagine waking up and your site is inaccessible for no apparent reason. If this happens, site owners could spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out what the problem is. Well welcome to that reality. Thousands of site owners have experienced this on August 2nd after Sitemeter brings their sites to a halt.

Some very popular websites learned the hard way that placing third-party code in your website's pages is a liability.

SiteMeter, a widely-used "counter and statistics tracker," made some changes to its "back-end system" that made it impossible for visitors using certain versions of Internet Explorer to load pages containing the SiteMeter code. When users would visit any sites using Sitemeter, they would be presented with an error message pop-up:
 

Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://www.sitename.com

 

Operation aborted

SiteMeter has since resolved the issue and in a blog post (http://weblog.sitemeter.com/2008/08/02/sitemeter-ie-issues-resolved/ - now off-line), explained the situation and apologised. That probably, however, didn't do much to quell the anger of webmasters using SiteMeter.

A simple "back-end" change made by a third-party whose JavaScript code you use on your pages, for instance, can render your website unusable to a large percentage of your visitors, as it did for SiteMeter users.

The SiteMeter problem highlights the fact that when you place third-party code in your website's pages, you are potentially making your website's operation wholly-dependent on a third-party.  Likewise if you use a 3rd party to host some of your content as ITV did for their CEO's pod-cast on their financial year end reports.  Sadly the 3rd party relocated the content without telling ITV resulting in a IE "404 Not found" message - not a great impression to give your potential investors or shareholders.

While some focus on the way companies like SiteMeter respond to incidents like this, pragmatic webmasters will always take control of their own fate and make decisions that reduce their vulnerability.  Those not as tech savvy as some of us were probably hit the hardest as they searched for a solution to a problem that they couldn't readily identify.

Unfortunately, this is a difficult task when it comes to third-party code because it's hard not to use third-party code on your website today. For instance, many of our clients use at least one service like SiteMeter or Google Analytics.

But you can take steps to mitigate your risk of falling victim to a SiteMeter-like problem.

Here are some tips:

• Don't use any third-party code that absolutely isn't needed. While some types of services (like analytics) are often too expensive to bring in-house, avoid using third-party services that you don't need when they require you to put code in your website's pages. I see a lot of websites that are making use of cutsie "widgets" that are superfluous. That's risky and you need to recognise the risks.
   
• Compare different services. If you need some solution that requires you to place third-party code in your website's pages, compare the services that provide that solution. Have any experienced major problems in the past? What are the policies of each? Don't hesitate to contact the services and ask them how they maintain the integrity of their code and what testing they do before rolling out new code.
   
• Consider free versus paid. While SiteMeter does have a premium service in addition to its free service, a lot of webmasters prefer to use free services for obvious reasons.
  
  Yet a worthwhile piece of legal advice is this - when you have paid a third-party to provide a service, you have a better ability to recover damages in the case that the third-party fails to deliver or harms you because of some negligent act. I'm not litigious but if your business depends on your website, you don't want to be dependent upon third-parties that have no real legal obligations to you.
   
• Monitor your website. While automatically catching errors generated by buggy JavaScripts can be difficult, you should be monitoring your website as it will pick up most problems that your users see and will allow you to be proactive in resolving issues rather than realising there's a problem when your revenue income falls off the scale.