Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Stop what you’re doing and make your passwords more secure! How, you ask? Read on to find out. It’s become very anecdotal when we speak about passwords for our online accounts and why these might matter. We all take this very lightly and assume that no one can guess or work out what our passwords are and thus we think no one will be able to access our most sensitive information be it online bank accounts, Amazon accounts, or your emails. We are wrong.

With so many of us working from home full time for the last 16 months, VPNs have become essential tools for companies to keep their staff working in a safe environment. What we mean by “safe” is mainly about your online presence whilst performing daily tasks for your job.

Website uptime monitoring is exactly what it sounds like; a service that monitors your website from the countries you’ve selected, to see if it is up and running. This saves you the stress of having to constantly use your resource to check for any downtime, or individual errors/issues, or run the risk of your customers telling you it’s down. The best part about uptime monitoring is that you can choose how often you’d like your site to be monitored.

You may or may not have heard of Google Core Web Vitals, but the importance of getting them right for your website is like Everest for website owners right now. So what are the Core Web Vitals and what should you do to make sure my website meets them? Google Core Web Vitals consist of 3 components that relate to page responsiveness, speed, stability, and how they affect the user experience. Already scrambling to Google what these mean? Don’t worry, all 3 will be explained in detail below.

We’ve all been there. when you visit a website and you get hit with a three-digit number SMACK in the face. For most, those 3 little numbers mean very little, but it’s definitely worth knowing the most common error codes so you can at least know if your favourite website is down forever, or will be returning in the next five minutes.

The Domain Name System, DNS for short, is one of the most important protocols on the internet, and yet relatively few people understand its purpose. DNS is a protocol which governs how computers exchange data online. Its purpose, simply stated, is to match names with numbers, helping to convert memorable domain names (such as statuscake.com), into an IP address (such as 8.8.8.8 for Google.com) that your browser can use. DNS is essentially a map or a phone book of the internet.

Google has finally started unveiling its algorithm update, much to many website owners’ dismay. Unfortunately, we don’t have a choice in the matter. Instead, we have to just jump on board and make sure that our websites are in tip-top condition so that the search engine giant can’t find a reason to penalise us or drop us in rankings. This refers to the average time the page takes to load when a customer clicks onto your website.

A phrase we never thought was possible – “the internet is down”, was being shouted across the world on Tuesday 8th June 2021. Alarm bells were ringing when hundreds of websites had an “error 503” show up when visitors tried to access them. So what happened to the internet? A relatively unknown company soon dominated global news headlines for causing the websites’ “blackout”.

After you register the domain for your website, you might take pride in owning your company’s online address. However, from a legal standpoint, you don’t own it. While you can register it, thieves can hijack it from you. Domain hijacking does not receive a lot of attention, but it is a real threat. Domain hijacking is also very frustrating, as it is relatively easy for thieves to hijack a domain, and once they get control, it can be very difficult and expensive to regain it.

As May draws to a close, it’s that time again to share with you the most surprising websites that went down this month. Now, I don’t like to “out” anyone but I do like to use these to emphasise that website downtime can affect any website, big or small. And ultimately, the impact is the same – potential customers gone elsewhere, higher bounce rate, lower SEO, and worst of all, lost revenue.