Stopping Black Friday Outages, Before They Start – Part 3 – Downtime
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?
Stopping Black Friday Outages, Before They Start – Part 2 – DNS & HTML
The big day came and you had the high ground, your website was great, you even had some good, cheap monitoring in place, but oops…it turns out that monitoring was a little too cheap. It turns out your “hey, this is cheap” website monitoring service cached the Domain Name Server (DNS) process. You had a DNS issue and you didn’t know it …but your customers did.
Stopping Black Friday Outages, Before They Start – Part 1 – Web Apps
For some online retailers the post Black Thursday eve, post Black Friday, post Cyber Monday analysis will be a time of joy and dreaming about a repeat in Black Friday 2013. For others it will be a tired “it was a perfect storm” excuse and finger pointing starting on Tuesday morning Nov. 27, 212. Why? Because invariably there are going to be websites that crash and burn during these peak days in the Black Friday 2012 online retail season. So, lets jump ahead, Back to the Future-style, and provide a few advance diagnostics that these soon-to-be, crash-and-burn online retail websites could have done in 5-minutes to save their 2012 seasons – before the big online shopping days actually arrive.
Black Friday 2012 Website Outage Watch – Minnesota Online Retailers
Dotcom-Monitor is currently monitoring the 12 Minnesota online retailers that ranked in the Internet Retailer 500 list in 2011. The website monitoring platform is currently aggregating information on Minnesota online retailers webpage speed, uptime / downtime, and details on the page element performance. Website homepages are being tested via an Internet Explorer browser running full page renders every 15 minutes from nine North American locations. These tests will not only provide a baseline for Minnesota’s top online retailers, but will also provide Dotcom-Monitor the data and analytics to pinpoint issues that occur on these Minnesota online company websites in relation to Black Friday, the Holiday Season and the increased traffic and server stress that will ensue.
Black Friday Looms – Free Website Performance Test & Uptime Monitoring
Black Thursday Eve, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, are here and web sales are expected to increase up to 18% this holiday shopping season compared to 2011, according to ComScore. Last year’s online retail holiday sales were $37.2 billion. Unfortunately, some website owners will discover that their website’s speed and performance does not meet customer expectations and they’ll miss out on their piece of the web sale pie.
So, with pressure on e-commerce websites to perform, web operation personnel are tasked to make websites look great and handle the stress points of added holiday traffic. Moreover, 2011-2012 has seen an explosion in the use third-party apps such as widgets, social media buttons, and third party icons that impact website speed and performance.
Monitoring the Cloud – Cloud Monitoring for Application Management
Cloud-based applications with poor performance cost companies lost revenues and customers. In fact, as cloud apps become more complex more performance issues can occur, resulting in lost conversions and higher rates of website abandonment. Therefore, companies running cloud web applications need to continually monitor for performance issues, functionality and availability.
Traditional web applications sit on static servers inside a data center behind company firewalls. This delivery chain is fixed with minimal variables. Cloud applications, however, are more complex by nature. Here the application delivery chain moves from an end-user through a browser (PC or mobile device), across the Internet (through a local ISP, or mobile carrier), through a third-party (cloud provider, or content delivery network (CDN)), into the complex infrastructure of a data center. All of these elements are essential to a cloud-based application’s performance making cloud testing and cloud monitoring much more challenging than traditional application performance management.
Minnesota’s Top Online Retailers Prep Websites for Black Friday Rush
Based on Internet Retailer magazine’s listing of the Internet Retailer 500, there are 12 Minnesota companies that ranked in the top 500 in 2011. With that in mind, Dotcom-Monitor (also a Minnesota-based company) set-up basic monitoring on these 12 top Minnesota online company homepages (run your own test here). The website monitoring gathered information on Minnesota online webpage speed, uptime/downtime, and details on the page element performance. By testing their home pages using an IE browser running every 15 minutes from nine North American locations over the course of a week, Dotcom-Monitor was able to pinpoint issues that are occurring on these Minnesota online company websites.
Company stakeholders are also carefully watching when highly publicized website crashes (such as Target’s website crash in 2011) impact Minnesota online retailers revenues and reputation with buyers. In 2012, according to Internet Retailer magazine now nearly all Minnesota online companies are monitoring their Web apps for performance. Monitoring helps these companies detect and diagnosis website errors during critical periods like the upcoming Black Thursday Eve, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the Holiday shopping season.
Election Day Results – Website Speed Romney vs Obama
Election day results are in! – Well, for candidate website speed and performance, that is… We monitored the performance of presidential candidate websites from Nov. 1 to Nov 6, for speed and uptime in this year’s Romney vs Obama 2012 contest using an Internet Explorer (IE) browser from eight USA-based locations at 15-minute intervals. During that time the amount of user traffic to the websites of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney likely increased.
Campaign websites, like the campaigns themselves, have spikes and valleys similar to Romney’s popularity and the President Obama approval rating. Our review of the President Obama website and Mitt Romney website is focused on how the candidate’s balance the design of their campaign websites with the need for speed at their campaign websites.
Hurricane Sandy’s Impact on the Internet
The impact of Hurricane Sandy on the web has focused, in part, on the flooding of three data centers in Lower Manhattan. Back up generator systems that relied on pumps to refuel generators were destroyed. Additionally, there have been reports of outages from major data hubs and other data center facilities are running solely on backup generator power.
Case Study: Black Friday Website Outages, Downtime, Average Page Speed
Dotcom-Monitor recently chose 20 midsized online companies to monitor for one week from those ranked 500-600 in the Internet Retailer 2011 ranking. We focused our monitoring on a demographic that encompasses what is considered a mid-size company, not large enough to have inexhaustible budgets, and just large enough to begin considering ways to optimize web site performance. By testing their websites at a 15-minute frequency from nine North American monitoring locations for seven days using a non-caching, Internet Explorer browser we were able to pinpoint potential areas to improve and issues to avoid.
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.
