What is the true cost of a website outage? Today’s digital economy operations require round-the-clock uptime as the amount of revenue generated by e-businesses is growing at a phenomenal rate. Consider the following…
April 23, 2013, 4:59 PM CST – Charles Schwab Website Down. At this time, Dotcom-Monitor is tracking a Schwab downtime issue. As of 4:49 PM CST the errors include very long load times from most worldwide monitoring locations, including: Minnesota, New York, London, California, Hong Kong, Montreal, Frankfurt, Colorado, Sydney, Texas, Amsterdam, Tel-Aviv, Amazon East Cloud, Shanghai, Buenos Aries, Amazon Cloud-Japan, and South Africa.
Website Uptime isn’t a Condition, it’s a Calculation
Central to service level agreement (SLA) reports is the concept of website “uptime.” However, what exactly is uptime? Website uptime, in the recent past was often narrowly defined as the working vs. non-working condition of a web server, ie web server uptime. More recently, we have worked with many organizations that are carefully defining the details of website uptime vs. downtime, by taking into account variables like network uptime, server uptime, web application uptime, or website uptime, has become critical.
If your business relies upon e-commerce or online marketing channels to attract customers, it is important that you consider the impact poor website performance can have on your business. At a recent Velocity Conference, Eric Schurman (Microsoft) and Jake Brutlag (Google) presented; “Users who experience a 2-second site slowdown make almost 2% fewer queries, click 3.75% less often, and report being significantly less satisfied with their overall experience.”
With both revenue and customer satisfaction on the line, monitoring the performance, availability and effectiveness of your website is critical. Manually-based website monitoring is not an option. It’s costly, time-intensive, and inconsistent.
Vimeo Website Down – At approximately 1:30pm CST on 01/16/2013 Dotcom-Monitor began sending alerts to its clients regarding Vimeo webpage elements timing out. Vimeo, is a U.S.-based video-sharing website on which users can upload, share and view videos. Dotcom-Monitor testing verified intermittent connection Vimeo outages occurring from worldwide locations. Dotcom-Monitor captured a video of the Vimeo outage homepage error (note the 5-second domain name server (DNS) load time) using its UserView Monitoring – Video Capture Technology.
Better prepared. Get a monitoring service that conducts automatic trace route diagnostics when downtime and outages occur. And lets dream a little here…won’t it be cool if a website monitoring service took a video of the error and you could play it back so you could see what your user’s experienced? Website monitoring with video capture of downtime errors…so 2013 sounding, isn’t it? Or is it?
As the Nov. 6, 2012 Election Day nears the two presidential hopefuls are in a close standoff. This year, even more than in year’s past a candidate’s website play an important role in presenting the candidates views and as a fundraising conduit. Dotcom-Monitor has been tracking both candidates’ websites MittRomney.com and BarackObama.com for uptime and performance. After all, if the candidate’s website isn’t up, or isn’t performing well it neither presents the candidates views, nor raises funds. We monitored both sites in 15-minute increments from eight USA-only locations using Internet Explorer, non-cached, starting on October 26th 2:30 pm CST. We present our presidential election website performance findings to-date here on Oct. 30, 2012. We will provide updates on the websites’ performance over the next few days as the race continues to intensify.
Hurricane Sandy hits New York City, power shut off in lower Manhattan, websites without redundant servers go down. According to several news reports, websites for the United Nations, Buzzfeed, Gawker, Gizmodo, the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Bloomberg news and Livestream went down. NYC-based Hosting and Internet Services Provider Datagram is among those affected.
Dotcom-Monitor is tracking the current Wells Fargo Bank outage as well as a reported US Bank outage and PNC outage. Dotcom-Monitor cannot confirm a denial of service attack is behind the current bank issues. We will provide updates on information regarding these banking websites as we research the issue.
One of the key principles involved in creating a successful website is establishing trust with users. These four key principles demonstrate how a unique, third-party website uptime validation tool helps to create trust with online users.
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