WatchMouse expands Website Monitoring Infrastructure to 35 Global Monitoring Stations (2008-09-01)
In order to meet customer demand, WatchMouse is proud to announce the expansion of its global infrastructure with another eight monitoring stations being deployed over the past two months. The new stations are in: India, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, Switzerland and the USA. WatchMouse now offers 25 monitoring stations in major European and North American cities, with a further 10 stations spread across Africa, the Middle East, South America and Oceania.
WatchMouse's extensive infrastructure provides the means to accurately monitor sites and web applications from the perspective of users based in different global locations. Such multi-point monitoring is imperative as site performance varies greatly depending on the location of the user (e.g. customers in the USA might quickly access a site, while for users in Germany, the same site has errors or a long load time). WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors explains that "Even if your site works well from your headquarters, customers may still have trouble reaching it from different external locations. As a slow or faulty site can frustrate users, damage the reputation of a company and result in lost sales, it is essential to monitor from more than one point."
As the vast majority of businesses are aware of the need for global performance monitoring, WatchMouse was surprised to find global performance issues on the sites of some major international organizations, including the social networking site Facebook. In recent research WatchMouse found that facebook.com performs well in the USA but showed serious user issues from many other locations.
WatchMouse’s market leading infrastructure can help international organizations identify performance issues. Equally, WatchMouse supports clients who require performance monitoring within a particular region by allowing monitoring to be restricted to a sub-set of monitoring stations. This feature is useful for companies that only trade within a large country (e.g. USA) or region (e.g. Europe) but still require comprehensive monitoring within their area of operation.
About WatchMouse
WatchMouse provides global performance monitoring to thousands of customers in over 70 countries. In addition to a market leading infrastructure, WatchMouse offers automated alerting and an advanced user interface for complete self-management of all monitoring features and subscription details.
Even website hosting companies have too little uptime (2007-02-05)
Leaseweb, Rackspace and WideXS score well
Utrecht, 5 February 2007 – Research carried out by WatchMouse, the Dutch site and server monitoring company, has revealed that many website hosting companies are not achieving optimum performance in terms of uptime. During the months November and December 2006, the company registered the average loading times and availability of the sites of eleven website hosting companies. Leaseweb, Rackspace and WideXS came out on top.
The three best-performing companies all had an average uptime of 99.99% or higher. A good score, says WatchMouse, although the company pointed out that, even when achieving this score, a site will still be unavailable for eight hours every year. The reasons for this downtime vary between sites, although problems with the name server (DNS) and excessive loading times dominate. The types of problem also differ from site to site, indicating that good choices – for example for DNS solutions – are essential.
Companies which scored 99.7% or less are at risk of losing clients annually owing to their site loading too slowly, or unavailability of the web page. Four of the eleven hosting companies scored below this limit and will therefore have to work on their availability. Nevertheless, the organisations tested generally performed better than the average bank website, for example.
"On the one hand, it is reassuring to see that website hosting companies recognise the importance of good availability. Nevertheless, there is room for improvement, particularly as it is precisely these companies that should be setting the pace", says Mark Pors, Chief Technology Officer at WatchMouse. "Customers looking for a web hosting company will not want to entrust the management of their site to a hosting company whose own site is unreliable. Optimum performance is therefore crucial, for these companies in particular."
The full results of the survey can be obtained from the WatchMouse site: www.watchmouse.com
Nedstat and WatchMouse start partnership (2008-04-14)
Online marketing and technical performance in one dashboard
Amsterdam, 14 April 2008 – Nedstat and WatchMouse announce a strategic partnership that brings together online marketing intelligence and technical performance. The new integration allows marketeers and technical managers to always have the same real-time view of the technical status of their online business activities. This makes it possible to react instantly when for instance decreasing online business has a technical cause.
The performance reports of WatchMouse have been seamlessly integrated in Sitestat and can be added easily to any online marketing dashboard. Marketeers now view the same technical site performance data as their technical colleagues, making communication between these disciplines within organisations much more efficient.
Michael Kinsbergen, CEO Nedstat. “The website is principally a marketing and communication channel and therefore the domain of marketeers. But it is also a technical channel so technical management plays an essential role as well. The Sitestat-WatchMouse connection has made the communication between both stakeholders much more direct and easy.”
Stan van de Burgt, WatchMouse CEO, says: “By measuring from different locations on the Internet, we can give a clear view of how the performance of a website is experienced by the visitor. Research has shown that visitors already leave after a waiting period of 4 seconds. The Nedstat and WatchMouse measurements are perfectly complementary in giving insight in the relationship between performance and visitor behaviour.”
The Sitestat-WatchMouse integration is directly available to all joint customers of Sitestat and WatchMouse.
About Nedstat
Nedstat is European leader in website analytics.
The products and services enable companies to improve the effectiveness and profitability of their online communication and business.
Nedstat makes website analytics straightforward and accessible for users of all levels and disciplines. Products are easy to use, reports are clear and fast to access, customization is easy and services and support are personal and high quality.
Nedstat employs 180 people in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom.
The client list includes many renowned and internationally operating organizations like ASICS Europe, Electrabel, Ernst & Young, KarstadtQuelle, Renault, Panasonic and Wolters Kluwer. Also, numerous government and not-for-profit organizations have benefited from Nedstat's expertise in delivering reports on users’ behaviour online.
Key accreditations by Europe’s leading independent web-standards organizations, such as ABC electronic and OJD, ensure that customers’ metrics are in full compliance with leading industry standards.
About WatchMouse
Accurate and independent monitoring of website performance enables businesses to address load time and many other potential user experience issues which might not be apparent when conducting in-house or single point monitoring.
WatchMouse's global infrastructure provides its customers with peace of mind that their site has been tested from the user's perspective, and external to the organization. As industry leaders in website performance monitoring, WatchMouse offers customers a web-based service with features such as SMS/email alerting and extensive reporting.
Many of the world's lead brands depend on WatchMouse to monitor their sites, providing independent confirmation of both in-house and suppliers' website performance.
For more information about Nedstat or WatchMouse, please visit www.nedstat.com or www.watchmouse.com.
