Presidential Election Website Performance and Uptime – Romney vs Obama
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 NYC data centers, Datagram website servers down
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.
Tracking Hurricane Sandy Impact on Service Providers, Data Centers, and Servers
Dotcom-Monitor tracks the Hurricane Sandy impact as it relates Service Providers, Data Centers, and Servers. Live Northeast network latency test available.
Bank Cyber Attacks: Responding to future DDoS attacks and website outages
Despite efforts to avoid bank website outages they have occurred on a very broad scale in 2012 are likely to continue to occur. Therefore, it is the banks that most effectively respond to website downtime issues that have a market advantage in avoiding the loss of bank website users.
Searching for the Fail Whale: Worldwide Twitter Page Speed Testing [infographic]
When Twitter is over capacity and the “Fail Whale” error message signals another Twitter outage or slows to an elephant crawl, it’s not a surprise to many Twitter users anymore. Over the years, Twitter performance has struggled to handle its rapidly growing capacity. Interestingly, the “Fail Whale” was originally drawn featuring an elephant (not a whale) in 2002 by an China-born artist named Yiying Lu.
PNC Financial: After the Website Outage, next steps
Downtime events like the Sept 27, 2012, PNC Financials website outage make for compelling headlines, banker headaches, and bank website user annoyances. But, is this downtime more than that? Is it another locus-of-control (digital access to money) in the modern age that is spinning out-of-control into an encroaching cyber black hole of economic chaos? Well no, but… downtime and slow downs do have an impact.
Update on U.S. Bancorp, PNC, Wells Fargo Outage: Reported Cyber Attack
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.
The GoDaddy DNS outage and Paternity Test: Who’s your GoDaddy?
The GoDaddy DNS outage and Paternity Test: Who’s your GoDaddy? Its another episode of the Maury Povich Paternity Test on DNS Outage TV yesterday. Having just written about a major AT&T DNS outage on Aug. 15, here we are again on Sept 10, 2012 witnessing the GoDaddy DNS outage. Millions of website and email users DNS look-up process is playing out like a Maury Povich TV episode of paternity testing gone wrong. First time visitors to a GoDaddy website type the GoDaddy URL into their browser and the answer from the DNS comes back “This aint your GoDaddy.” Or something like that.
Caffeinated DNS Monitoring and the AT&T DNS Outage
To Cache or Not-to-Cache – that is the DNS Monitoring Question
Firstly, it is not generally well-known that external-based HTTP request-type website monitoring, like coffee at your local java joint, comes in different “grades” – cache-based and non-cache based. Dotcom-Monitor employs non-cached monitoring, which propagates through the full DNS process with each monitoring instance. Cache-based monitoring (used by many basic monitoring services) does not propagate through the DNS process and misses DNS issues.
How to Effectively Monitor for the next DNS Outage Situation
In the case of the AT&T DNS outage issue there are several key factors that help to speed up Time-to-Repair (TTR), or avoiding downtime.
Website Performance Test – Testing Olympic Game 2012 Websites [Infographic]
Website Performance Test
As one of the world’s most important sporting events the Olympic Games attract millions of people from around the world. The mass media websites that cover the Games must be able to work under unprecedented loads of traffic. The Dotcom-Monitor team decided to take the opportunity to run a website performance test analyzing how the most powerful mass media websites respond to this massive influx of website visitors during the Olympic Games.
We setup website performance monitoring using two Dotcom-Monitor solutions: ServerView and BrowserView Platforms.
Doing DNS Monitoring Right: The AT&T DNS Outage
Doing DNS Monitoring Right: The AT&T DNS Outage: The AT&T domain name server (DNS) outage of Aug. 15, 2012 exemplifies why a “non-cache based” method for monitoring of websites is important for mission-critical websites. Firstly, a bit of a review. The most common, basic form of website monitoring is conducted using a synthetic browser (not an actual browser), which connects to the target server via an HTTP request process. A number of server-focused processes, such as the availability of the target server, the time it takes to load the HTML file for the website from the server, and the capability to detect keywords within the HTML file are checked via the use of a synthetic browser using an HTTP request process.
DNS Diagnostic: Update on the ATT DNS error
August 15, 2012-The ATT DNS outage demonstrates the importance of real-time root cause diagnostics when monitoring Internet services. Intermittent ATT DNS errors were first detected at 5:23 AM PST by Dotcom-Monitor a full hour before AT&T reported the issue. The Dotcom-Monitor Minnesota node noted the issue and captured a diagnostic DNS trace at the time of error. Non-clients of Dotcom-Monitor can use a free DNS trace tool here to test if their domain is affected by selecting Trace Style “DNS”.
This piece of info was sent immediately to Dotcom-Monitor clients whose services were affected by the ATT DNS outage. This diagnostic gave Dotcom-Monitor clients immediate info that pinpointed the root cause of the issue without the need for additional troubleshooting. Dotcom-Monitor clients using ATT DNS made extremely fast, informed decisions, such as moving their DNS to another provider, or taking alternative measures to re-route traffic.
