News
New Service: Monitoring the epicenter (DNS) of your online brands (2008-01-24)
Your domain name directs customers to a website where you represent your brand and all that it stands for but are you managing and regularly monitoring the domain name service (DNS) which translates your domain name and brings your customers to you? DNS consistency monitoring can help ensure your business does not lose customers to a slow or faulty DNS.
It is useless to have paid for an expensive and fully redundant web site server (park), if the DNS servers fail to respond, respond incorrectly, or inconsistently. Your DNS must be consistent and correct. Monitoring for DNS consistency is particularly important if you have online services relying on one or more domain names (and that is almost always the case). It doesn't matter if your DNS servers are maintained in-house or outsourced, you need to know if they are doing what they are supposed to do.
WatchMouse's DNS consistency monitoring (now available in closed beta) checks your DNS systems and provides rapid notification of any unexpected DNS behaviour.
The WatchMouse's 'domain' type rule allows you to monitor the consistency of the behaviour of your DNS servers. It queries for a specified domain, performs a number of checks to test the health of your DNS servers and monitors for any difference in behaviour of your name servers. (If you also need to check that a domain name resolves to the correct IP address(es), you can use the 'dns' type rule which will be offered as part of the WatchMouse DNS consistency monitoring).
This new service will be available to all WatchMouse customers with a performance monitoring subscription (Webmaster and higher) and can be configured on the Monitoring Settings page. To set-up DNS consistency monitoring, simply enter the domain name (advanced settings are available).
Fancy participating in our closed beta test?
- Contact us to request participation in the beta.
- Collect all the domain names that are important to your business.
- Go to the Monitoring Settings page.
- Add a 'new rule' and select 'domain' from the type menu, for each of the domains you wish to monitor.
- Specify the other settings you would like for other rule types, hit 'save', and you're done!
- The results of the domain name monitoring appear in your logs, reports, and graphs instantly.
Press releases
Linux-based website beats Windows-based sites (2007-06-24)
WatchMouse research shows Linux/Apache has less downtime and yields faster websites than Microsoft/IIS
London, June 20, 2007 – Linux websites have better uptime and load faster than Windows-based websites. Research by WatchMouse, a website monitoring company, also shows that web server platform Apache outperforms the Microsoft IIS platform. Therefore, having a Linux website and an Apache webserver platform offers the best choice for professional web pages.
WatchMouse researched the performance of over 1500 websites across different economic sectors in Europe. Most websites in this study are based on either Linux or Windows. Linux offers the best uptime. When looking at web server platforms the overall opinion favours Microsoft IIS and Apache although the latter outperforms the former in this area as well. The research finds that apart from operating system and web server platform, uptime also depends on the country where the server is based.
On average, Windows and Linux are running more than three quarters of all websites. However, there are differences between countries. Poland and Germany favour Linux combined with Apache for their websites while the professional sites in the UK and Sweden rely heavily on Windows/ Microsoft IIS. When looking at the relative performance of the different web server platforms, Linux clearly beats Windows.
One in four of the monitored professional websites have an uptime of 99.9% which suffices for customer satisfaction. Two thirds of the websites have an availability of less than 99.9% which accounts for at least 8 hours downtime per year. According to WatchMouse this is not acceptable.
“Even though the companies in our study seem to prefer Windows over Linux, our research shows they would be better off using Linux/Apache based websites. Research has shown that most web users are very impatient and will wait no longer than four seconds for a webpage to load”, says Mark Pors, Chief Technology Officer at WatchMouse. “Companies need to realise that website uptime is crucial for a healthy customer satisfaction and a solid client base. Organisations need to become more aware of the impact the choice of web server platform can have on their overall availability and performance.”
A complete overview of the monitoring results of the WatchMouse Site Availability Index, listing all the sites monitored, can be found on
http://www.watchmouse.com/SPI/
Social networking sites slow and inaccessible (2008-01-10)
WatchMouse research shows Facebook performance poorest of all
The Netherlands, January 10, 2008 – Popular social networking sites fail to deliver to their users, according to WatchMouse. Research from the leading website monitoring company has shown that web 2.0 sites often are slow to open or fail to load properly. WatchMouse monitored the time it took the social networking sites, listed on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites), to load. The results showed that the worst for availability is the immensely popular Facebook.
Other well known culprits include Twitter, last.fm, Windows Live Spaces, Friendster and del.icio.us. Of the 104 sites monitored, 51 show a Site Performance Index (SPI) of 1000 or more, making them very slow in load time. A remarkable outcome, seeing as most sites heavily use Ajax, which should lead to quicker load times since the dynamics of the site do not load immediately. Using Ajax should help websites increase interactivity, speed, functionality and usability by exchanging small amounts of data with the server so the entire webpage does not need loading fully every time someone performs an action on a page.
Of the monitored social networking sites, Faceparty performed the best - with an SPI of 303 - meaning users can access the site most frequently and in the fastest time. Looking at the results, most sites still have a lot to work on if they want their users to keep returning to their site. Research has shown that most web users are very impatient and will wait no longer than four seconds for a webpage to load.
“It is interesting to see that popular networking sites turn out to have very bad performance,” said Mark Pors, CTO at Watchmouse. “It is surprising they still have such a big fan base when they serve their users so badly. Using Ajax technology, they should be able to work more effectively. For now the sites will need to do a lot of work to remain popular and improve their performance.”
A complete overview of the monitoring results of the WatchMouse Site Availability Index, listing all the sites monitored, can be found on http://www.watchmouse.com/SPI/2008/performance_social_networking_sites.php
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
