There’s an old proverb; an inch of time is an inch of gold but you can’t buy that inch of time with an inch of gold. In the landscape of ecommerce we hold true to that proverb, and though you can’t purchase uptime outright, you can guard it with website monitoring. Time equals money but the value of convenience should also be considered. When ease of use returns profits, speed and functionality become primary resources. How can website monitoring improve your user experience?

Pop quiz, hotshot. How much does it cost to build a self-hosted Kubernetes cluster? Quick, no conferring. If you thought the answer was “nothing”, go to the back of the class. According to distributed systems expert Cindy Sridharan, quoted in Cloud Native DevOps with Kubernetes, the answer is “one million dollars”: It takes well over a million dollars just in engineer salary to get Kubernetes up and running from scratch. And you still might not get there.

You manage one of the world’s largest messaging platforms. It’s the middle of the afternoon and you are feeling confidence set in. Your company has recently beefed up its capacity, and performance has never been better. You’re about to step out for a late lunch when a drop in metrics starts triggering alarms. What do you do? *record scratch* Yep, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation…

Every process on the net is a logical journey, including the Google blacklist – even when it’s done in error. Nothing kills profits like losing your web traffic; so here’s all you need to know about blacklists, how to avoid them, and – if your site is branded with a red warning banner – how to get off them.

An acquaintance of mine works for a company that still uses Windows XP to manage some internal applications. The higher ups of the company refuse to adopt the new versions, given costs and technical gaps, and it’s created something of a Pandora’s box for employee turnover. With no strong internal reference documentation, each new departure leaves IT wondering two things. This rather amusing conundrum is apparently not an isolated incident.