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.
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.
