We hear a lot of questions from folks taking their first steps into website monitoring about how the service works and what we offer. One of the more frequently asked questions is why they need us at all. After all, they have metrics from XYZ provider who can tell them if they have consumed too much bandwidth or are overloaded with traffic. Wouldn’t they just know that they were up or down by watching those metrics?
By now it’s no secret that system outages and website downtime are more widespread and frequent than ever. In fact, the frequency of outages jumped 9% in just the first week of 2022. This can be attributed to a rapid increase in traffic and reliance on tech infrastructures – resulting in connectivity, server, and other technical issues that are alternately unforeseen and unavoidable.
Have you found yourself confused by the plans and pricing around website performance monitoring? Are you using the features you’re paying for? Finding the right service involves many moving parts. Very often, that journey begins with a quest to find a simple up or down monitoring tool for external verification. It’s only after you take that first step into the market that you begin to notice additional features and expanded functionality.
Status pages are a valuable asset for any website or SaaS business – especially today when outages and downtime have never been more common and uptime expectations have never been higher. Whether your site is down or all systems are perfectly operational, hosted status pages provide external users and internal stakeholders with a single source of truth regarding uptime performance. When done well, status pages are elegant and custom-branded.
Websites are an amenity packaged as a utility. If your site isn’t reliable and fast, users have options to replace it and they probably will. How you build your site and how you maintain it impacts your site’s success. Regardless of whether you’re launching your website, relaunching, or even rebranding, you don’t have to break the wheel to build a solid website that can withstand the traffic and growth of your enterprise.
Early Twitter was an adventure. Every day was an open question: would you be able to log in or did the next big story crash the platform? It was taking off and crashing and flying and crashing again. All in real time. It was an exciting time for the internet, and while everything has changed since then it got us thinking: why did we used to tolerate stuff just not working? And why do we still tolerate stuff not working?
What if I told you one of the most common mistakes businesses make is reporting on website performance without understanding user experience? What if I said there was much more to website performance monitoring than simply alerting you when your site is experiencing a downtime outage? No two websites – or baselines – are exactly the same.
Have you ever had to purchase a CPU or a GPU? If so, you have probably come across the term “bottlenecking”. There is a certain threshold where output exceeds ability to process, and that can prevent optimal system functionality. One of the methods used in computing to overcome these bottlenecks is multi-threading, where requests are processed simultaneously by multiple threads. We can apply a similar principle to downtime monitoring.
Two major shifts are simultaneously taking place in the world of website monitoring: the acceleration of digital dependence has increased the need for high-performing websites and the frequency (and severity) of downtime outages continues to climb. These shifts have made it more important than ever for businesses of all sizes and industries to monitor uptime and page speed.
When it comes to your website, visual content plays a huge role. In a world where it takes our brains only 13 milliseconds to process an image – visuals help narrate your brand story in a quick and visually captivating way. This ability to process images so quickly places even more importance on the need for crisp high-quality content. A website tainted with fuzzy and blurry images can affect engagement and lead to an overall negative experience for visitors.
