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So far UptimePal has created 6 blog entries.

Load Testing: A Brief Overview

By | July 6th, 2017|Load Testing, Website Down|

While many of our customers may be accustomed to how uptime/downtime monitoring works, they may not be familiar with load testing and why it’s so important. The purpose of this blog post is to provide an overview of load testing, stress testing, and look at various ways that it can be used to improve website speed and performance. Load Testing vs Stress Testing When trying to understand load testing, it’s important to look at its cousin—stress testing. Let’s take a closer look at definitions and see how they are similar and also how they differ. Load testing is the process of applying a steady level of demand to a website or server to see how it performs under load. For example, if you’re a retailer who is preparing for Black Friday or Cyber Monday, you want to ensure that you website and servers can handle the increased demand that those shopping days bring. In order to simulate the flood of users that would visit your site on these days, you’d build a load test using either a free or paid tool, run the test, and then make adjustments to your servers to plan for the increased capacity (this is sometimes called “capacity planning”). In contrast to load testing, let’s look at the definition of stress testing. Stress testing is essentially applying a load to a website or web server, similar to load testing, but instead of measuring performance under and expected load, you’re applying load until the website or server stops functioning properly and crashes. While load testing seeks to find the performance of a website or server under expected load, stress testing seeks to find the breaking point, which is also extremely useful in capacity planning. […]

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5 Common Causes of Website Downtime

By | August 7th, 2014|Website Down|

What’s Causing Your Website Downtime? Having a website that’s constantly going down or becoming unavailable can be incredibly frustrating for both users and webmasters. These frustrations can mean your followership may chose to abandon your website, losing valuable traffic and ultimately revenues for your website. There are a number of reasons that a website may be down, so let’s take an in-depth look at the top 5 reasons for your website downtime. Poor Quality Web Hosting It’s no secret that not all web hosts are created equally, and some hosts in particular are notorious for being down. These are often budget hosts that oversell their servers, or allow spammers to sign up for multiple accounts and hog server resources. This isn’t to say that there good quality budget hosting is an oxymoron; it’s just that the existence of it may be relatively rare. The old saying of “you get what you pay for” tends to be true more often than not when it comes to web hosting. With that said, there are also some budget hosts that outperform more expensive hosts because they are smaller companies, and may take more care in maintaining their servers. Again, hosting can be a very subjective and varied experience, but that doesn’t change the fact that low quality hosting, regardless of price, is one common reason for downtime issues. […]

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Uptime Monitoring: Holding Your Web Hosting Company to their SLA

By | July 30th, 2014|Website Monitoring|

The Benefits of Uptime Monitoring Are you considering uptime monitoring, but don’t know if it will be useful enough? Well, beyond knowing when your site is up/down and being able to proactively take care of problems, you could be costing yourself money every month by not holding your web host accountable to their service level agreement, or SLA.  Let’s take a closer look at what SLAs are, and how you can use a service like UptimePal to make sure that your web hosting SLA is met and your host company keeps up their end of the bargain. Understanding a Web Hosting SLA Most web hosts have a set level of uptime that they must meet spelled out in their service level agreement. You may recall seeing web hosts advertising things like “99.9% uptime” or other similar metrics. This metric usually means that a web host must have operational servers 99.9% of the time or more in order to meet the terms of their SLA. This is typically a selling point for web hosting because people are often looking to for the most reliable hosting that they can find. The greater the uptime number the better the service. So, what happens if a web host falls short of this number? Well, that depends on what else is in the SLA. Sometimes SLAs can be lengthy documents, and there is often language in the agreement that specifies exactly what counts as downtime, and other various stipulations. If a web host doesn’t meet their end of the SLA, then they may offer a certain amount of money back, free services for a period of time, or other benefits. Again, this would be determined by the exact language in an SLA, so you should review yours carefully. […]

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How Frequently Should You Monitor Your Website?

By | July 2nd, 2014|Website Monitoring|

Selecting the right website monitoring frequency is a matter of individual performance requirements and ROI. Optimum Frequency to Monitor Website State Changes Website monitoring frequency is something that’s been debated among e-commerce and web performance junkies for years. Perhaps you’re wondering, “What is the optimum frequency to monitor website state changes such as uptime/downtime”? Like many other things in the webmaster world, it’s really a question that boils down to the individual website performance requirements of your organization. Faster Frequency to Monitor Website Uptime/Downtime A faster monitoring frequency is always better — the only problem with that is it is usually relatively expensive. The reason that the cost has historically been higher (and still is with most competitors within the industry) is because a shorter monitoring frequency uses more resources on the server, costing the service provider more. Therefore, customers generally have to pay more for a high frequency. […]

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User Experience Monitoring: How do Users React to a Website Outage?

By | June 12th, 2014|Website Down, Website Monitoring|

Monitoring your website for uptime/downtime provides a consistent user experience that keeps your customers happy.   Keeping your End Users Happy End Users, readers, website visitors… whatever term you’d like to use, these are people who visit your site; people who have power to make your site popular or unpopular—people who have the power to make your site succeed or fail. With that said, doesn’t it make sense to keep these people happy? Whether you have a small foodie blog, or a giant e-commerce website, you still need to keep these end users satisfied, and one of the best ways to do that (beyond great customer service and a great product or service offering) is to implement user experience monitoring to make sure that your website is operating properly. Website Monitoring Leads to a Good User Experience One of the worst things for your reputation as a blogger, webmaster, or e-business owner is an error-prone, problematic website. This can be especially bad if you’ve spent time working on promoting your site, only to have people visit it and find that it’s down. There are a number of reasons why a website may not load properly which can include hosting or server problems, issues with the CMS (such as WordPress), security problems (such as hackers), and other various issues. Whatever the problem, if you care about your visitors, it’s important to know when there’s a problem as soon as possible so you can take steps to remedy it before end users notice or lose trust in your website. […]

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