Speed. Availability. Security. Name recognition. These are things everyone cares about, in any online industry. Whether you're selling shoes, running a charity, or operating a multi-national company with global online presence, it matters that your customers feel safe to interact online with you, and that they have a fast, efficient experience at your site to bring them back again.
Speed and availability are becoming two of the biggest challenges for hosting companies and SSL providers alike. Speed of OCSP lookup is important, to keep within acceptable guidelines of page load times. Symantec is constantly looking for ways to improve, and we invest in expanding our infrastructure to enhance speed and reliability. GlobalSign has advertised that they outsourced their OCSP lookup to CloudFlare. Now, there's nothing wrong with a company outsourcing services, if it helps operate more safely and efficiently.
Alas CloudFlare has had some significant recent outages, so while speedy they have failed now and again at availability. You can read their KB article here. And any certificate authority who thinks this level of service is acceptable clearly isn’t taking their customer’s security seriously enough.
Symantec has military-grade data centers protecting our SSL and PKI infrastructure, and our validation edge infrastructure has delivered 100% uptime for many years. We have speed, availability, and security covered.