New Features to Test How DNS Caching Affects Your Website
The new DNS caching features at Dotcom-Monitor allow you to perform some interesting tests that show how DNS caching can affect your page load speed.
We realize that many organizations monitor their online services with a number different goals in mind, and so we listened to the feedback we received that some users want to include the DNS response time in their monitoring and some users want to be able to remove DNS response from their monitors.
How you wish to handle DNS response time in regard to your monitoring needs is up to you, but we want to take this opportunity to show the differences in how DNS response time affects website load using our new tools.
We ran a test monitoring YouTube from a single location in the midwest United States with three different DNS cache settings. A basic HTTP full page load on the YouTube front page resulted in some interesting, although not that surprising results.
Keep in mind the results will vary depending upon a number of variables such as which locations you are monitoring from, the time of day, the load on the DNS servers, and on the website servers.
Four Tips to Beat Single Page Design – Parallax Performance Issues
Parallax websites are compelling and easy to follow. However, because all of the graphics and text are on one page and these sites often use video, they can also be a performance nightmare if not optimized correctly.
A Tale of Monitoring DNS Blacklists
For George, the clean-up is just beginning. He is not even yet aware that his domain is blacklisted. All he knows is that he can’t send out additional emails, the update email on the company party that evening is now a fire-drill, and his boss is giving the system administrator and him the stink eye. The problem of not knowing for hours that your site has appeared on a DNS Blacklist (DNSBL) and that email—and, even worse, potentially website visitors—are being rejected is a problem with both primary impacts and multiple secondary impacts.
Dotcom-Monitor adds VictorOps as Integration Partner
Integration furthers speed and effectiveness of WebOps, DevOps, and network teams’ support of applications, networks, and infrastructures.
Innovations in Microsoft Exchange Monitoring
Microsoft Exchange continues to grow in popularity, but until recently active monitoring via full round-trip processes have been lacking in the marketplace. As a result network administrators have found it difficult to accurately pinpoint Microsoft Exchange issues effectively. Dotcom-Monitor’s Microsoft Exchange Monitoring, actively monitors both the availability and performance of Exchange components and provides alerts and diagnostics information when an issue is detected. Among a wealth of other features, the solution includes the industry’s only tool for monitoring ActiveSync externally, so it mimics the same experience a real user would receive.
Web Performance Testing Now Front and Center Across the Company
As e-commerce continues to grow, Web performance is being thrust into the spotlight. However, new performance statistics indicate there’s significant work to do to improve overall website performance and reach industry standards.
SIP Monitoring: VoIP Market Growth creates a need for SIP testing
The VoIP marketplace is growing. If your organization uses a SIP-based VoIP solution its likely you’ve experienced issues in the form of dropped calls, or the inability to receive calls. Dotcom-Monitor’s SIP monitoring service tests a SIP-based VoIP system by actually making SIP test calls and measuring the results, allowing you to get back to work and know that your VoIP system is continually online.
Five Tips to Help Your Mobile Website Meet User Expectations
There’s no doubt about it—users are now just as likely to use their mobile devices instead of their desktop or laptop to surf the web, make purchases and more. What’s more, they expect their mobile user experience to be at least as fast and perform as well as a non-mobile user experience. If a mobile website is slow or performs poorly mobile users are likely to move on – often to a competitor’s mobile website. Here are five tips to help your mobile website meet user expectations.
CDN Monitoring and “Cheshire Cat” Websites
How can you tell if the CDN you’re utilizing is actually paying dividends in terms of speeding up delivery of content to your website users? CDN monitoring can help the IT department—which has lost significant control over the servers that store the content because of CDN use—track key metrics to determine CDN performance and see if the CDN is living up to its SLA.
Another Neustar UltraDNS Outage
April 30, 2014 – Neustar UltraDNS Down – Dotcom-Monitor is tracking a Neustar UltraDNS outage at this time. The UltraDNS outage appears to have started at approximately 10:34 am CST and extended to
Optimizing the Front End with Time to Interact (TTI)
Despite claims that slow websites are a major turnoff for site visitors the problem is growing. However, there is a bright spot, as some websites have caught on to an emerging key metric for the usability of a website and the user experience it delivers: Time to Interact (TTI).
IRCE – The World’s Largest E-Commerce Event | IRCE 2014 Promo Code
Dotcom-Monitor is proud to be exhibiting at IRCE again this year (see us at Booth 1929). We’ve had a blast at past shows, and are excited to do it all again! Last year we gave our loyal fans an IRCE registration discount and some sweet RC helicopters. This year we continue the chopper tradition and add some ultra-nerdy “uptime matters” t-shirts to the mix.
