Website Monitor

WatchMouse offers 'white label' pages for resellers (2005-01-31)

WatchMouse resellers can now use the WatchMouse white label pages at no extra charge. These pages without WatchMouse branding can be used to integrate into your own website, in order to offer monitoring services to your customers. For more on the WatchMouse white label have a look at:

• WatchMouse Standard White-label User manual
• White label example site.

For more on the WatchMouse reseller program go to the reseller pages.

WatchMouse widget 1.1 released (download widget) (2005-12-17)

WatchMouse releases version 1.1 of their Apple Dashboard site monitoring widget.

NETHERLANDS, 2005-12-16. By means of the WatchMouse widget Apple users get direct insight into the accessibility of their own Internet site. The widget can be downloaded for free from the Apple website.

At regular intervals the dashboard widget checks one or more sites from the users own computer. Also, the availability of the site during the last 72 hours is registered. A problem is followed by an alert, which is then verified by all WatchMouse control stations.

Features

• Checks your website from your own computer every 1, 5, 15, 30, or 60 minutes (new in this release).
• Displays the uptime over the last 72 hours.
• Alerts you in case of an error and...
• Verifies errors from all the WatchMouse worldwide monitoring stations

The new version also fixes some minor bugs. The free WatchMouse site monitoring widget can be downloaded from the Apple website , and requires Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or later.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/networking_security/watchmousesitemonitor.html

Award-winning Web pioneer embarks on European partner drive (2009-05-14)

WatchMouse looks to boost sales of enterprise solutions through channel expansion

LONDEN, UK - WatchMouse, one of the fastest growing companies in the Netherlands, and winner of the Deloitte and Touche rising star award in 2005, is recruiting new value added resellers across Europe.

The company leads the market in subscription self-service website monitoring solutions, and is now expanding its offering with more complex monitoring solutions for large companies. It is looking for established partners with networking or internet security expertise to take both offerings to market.

Resellers that become a partner, will get margin on WatchMouse subscription fees, delivering recurring revenue. On top of that they can charge fees for additional services, such as configuration, maintenance, setup and consultancy. With the more complex solutions for the enterprise, resellers can also add value through the sale of service contracts.

WatchMouse offers a full support program to its resellers, which includes:

• Marketing material & documentation
• Training
• Second line support
• Leads, generated by its free trial service and marketing activities

"Until now, our self-service monitoring services have been predominantly sold directly by WatchMouse. As more and more large companies are turning to us for services, we need people on the ground that are close to these companies both physically and culturally," said Stan P. van de Burgt, CEO WatchMouse.

"The indirect channel is a prerequisite - especially for our new range of services, as these are typically sold person-to-person, so expertise is needed for both set-up and execution," he added.

New version of WatchMouse widget available (2006-10-03)

WatchMouse widget for Apple computers has been expanded: from local monitoring to worldwide monitoring.

The WatchMouse Site Monitoring Dashboard widget was already available for local monitoring, but the current version (2.0.4) can now also be linked to your WatchMouse account. The widget, which already checked one website every 1, 5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes from your own computer, can now also be used to display the checks of the websites in your account and the availability of these websites during the past 24 hours. In the event of a malfunction, a check is performed by all WatchMouse monitoring stations. The widget provides an immediate warning or a warning after 2 to 5 successive errors.

The expanded WatchMouse Site Monitoring widget can be downloaded free of charge from the WatchMouse website and can be installed within 1 minute. URL: http://www.watchmouse.com/widget/dashboard_widget.php

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.

WatchMouse and Nedstat - Combining web site analytics and site performance (2008-06-02)

WatchMouse recently integrated with Nedstat's tool Sitestat. Nedstat is Europe's leading website analytics provider. Combining Nedstat's marketing intelligence with WatchMouse's website performance monitoring, enables customers to gain insight into the relationship between performance and visitor behavior.

The integration between WatchMouse and Nedstat should be of great benefit to WatchMouse customers who are using Sitestat Pro (or are considering using it) as it enables you to view your WatchMouse performance monitoring & Sitestat visitor statistics together. After making a few simple adjustments to your existing WatchMouse interface, you can view and compare both performance and visitor statistics, embedded in custom WatchMouse reports and thereby quickly spot any possible correlation between them e.g. an inverse relationship between your site's download time and your page views.

Having WatchMouse and Sitestat data presented in one custom report could help you identify when improvements to your site or infrastructure are needed, and as you implement improvements, you can track customer reaction and hopefully see a rapid return-on-investment with increased page views and online sales.

To find out how to integrate Sitestat data into your WatchMouse interface visit the Visitor statistics FAQs.

To view the brochure click here: Nedstat and WatchMouse partnership brings online marketing and technical performance data together [PDF file]

XXXXXXX XXXXX (2009-12-07)

Fout ISDN legt deel NL websites paar uur lam Afgelopen nacht raakten een groot aantal Nederlandse websites onbereikbaar door een fout van SIDN (Stichting Domein Registratie Nederland). De websites functioneerden waarschijnlijk perfect, maar omdat bij de host namen niet meer het bijbehorende IP adres kon worden gevonden. De storing begon middernacht en werd pas na 6:40 vanochten opgelost. SIDN is volgens eigen zeggen verantwoordelijk voor het stabiel functioneren van het .nl-domein op het internet dat meer dan 2.9 miljoen domeinnamen telt. Mark Pors, CTO van WatchMouse: "We zagen het aantal niet-bereikbare websites vanacht behoorlijk toenemen. De sites waren, ook buiten Nederland, niet bereikbaar tussen twaalf en zes". WatchMouse monitored met 26 controlestations websites maar ook DNS servers, welke de domein- en host namen omzetten in IP adressen. Deze DNS servers zijn volgens Pors "vaak de Archilleshiel van het goed functioneren van een site, iets dat maar weinig bedrijven zich realiseren. Meestal ligt het probleem bij een provider. Dat een heel topdomein problemen heeft hebben we in West Europa en de VS nog niet meegemaakt". De site van SIDN gaf om 10:30 nog geen nadere informatie over de storing, maar op verschillende sites wordt het 'verkeerd terugzetten van een backup' als oorzaak aangewezen. Zie ook: Tweakers en ISPam.

BadBoy Software updates scripting recorder to improve WatchMouse's Functional testing service (2009-01-07)

The WatchMouse Functional testing service allows you to define multi-step tests through a website and replay them periodically from the WatchMouse monitoring stations. This goes beyond just monitoring site performance and uptime, it allows you to verify that your web applications and back end systems really work.
More information on this service can be found on the Transaction Monitoring & Web Application Testing page.

In a co-operation with BadBoy software, who provide a tailored version of their recoder software which allows you to upload the resulting script directly into your WatchMouse dashboard.

Feedback from our "Functional testing" customers has lead to several essential improvements to the BadBoy recorder. This improved version has now been released and we recommend all our customers to upgrade to this version.
The new - WatchMouse specific - version can be downloaded here: http://www.badboy.com.au/versions/BadboyInstaller-2.0-latest_wm.exe

The most important changes are:

CHANGES IN BADBOY 2.0.7

   #1097: Multipart Forms Incorrectly export Parameters to JMeter Encoded causing Double Encoding

   #1087: Use Follow-Redirect Option in JMeter for More Reliable Export Playback

   #1086: Export Referer and Other Default Headers to JMeter

   #1085: Assertions placed as Children of Requests not Exported to JMeter

CHANGES IN BADBOY 2.0.6.1

   #1075: Security Update (MS08-052 - Critical)

The full release notes can be found here: http://badboy.com.au/versions/ReleaseNotes-2.0.7.txt

Cloud Watching (2009-10-08)

One of our business partners, Peter van Eijk, has used the WatchMouse website monitoring network to measure a number of cloud providers. He has made some interesting observations. You will also love the presentation tool he used. Use any browser to watch it at http://prezi.com/39648. If you twitter you can also follow him @petersgriddle

Launching WatchMouse Laboratories: the tech playground for website monitoring (2009-10-08)

We just launched WatchMouse Laboratories (labs.watchmouse.com)

This blog is the experimental outlet of the WatchMouse engineering team. Here we will share our thoughts on website monitoring, publish experimental features, hand out beta-invites and ask for your opinion.

Our first post is "Investigating IPv6 Website Monitoring", explaining about our work to be ready for the IPv6 Internet. As you might know IP addresses are running out, and many efforts are being made to replace the current Internet Protocol (IPv4) with version 6, which allows for an almost unlimited number of IP addresses.

Of course this will also have consequences on Website Monitoring of IPv6 enabled web sites and servers. WatchMouse is currently working to make this part of their standard offering, and some of our thoughts and findings are shared on our new labs blog.

Read more about IPv6 Website Monitoring on our labs site, and feel free to leave a comment!

Monitor your transition to IPv6 with WatchMouse (2009-10-14)

You've heard it before, and it's being announced more frequently and louder: The number of available addresses on the Internet is running out, and we all should move to the new addressing scheme, IPv6, as soon as possible. The uptake has been rather slow in the past, but that seems to be changing now as companies, ISPs, and other organizations are taking their first steps on the road to the IPv6 world. For most of these companies, however, this is quite a big step, with many things to consider and many uncertainties.

External IPv6 monitoring

As of today, WatchMouse offers IPv6 monitoring for web sites and other external services of your company. The monitoring network will, just like visitors of your website that happen to be on an IPv6 connected network, connect to your site when an IPv6 record is available in the DNS of your domain.

Check your IPv6 connectivity right now? Just visit our Check Host tool or the Ping tool. And while you're at it, set up a rule in your account to monitor your site continuously from our world wide monitoring network.

Many changes

To fully enable IPv6 monitoring, we have upgraded several components of our infrastructure:

• Our worldwide monitoring infrastructure, including the monitoring software
• The backend systems, including our databases and the WatchMouse API (see a post on this on WatchMouse Labs).
• The configuration portal (settings), where you can now specify whether or not to monitor over IPv6, if possible.
• The free tools on our site: check host and ping.

By offering IPv6 standard in all packages (including the free package and the 30-day trial) and in the tools on our site, we hope to facilitate a smoother transition to IPv6 in your organization.

Is your company interested in IPv6? Then do keep an eye on our IPv6 posts on WatchMouse labs.

New feature included in all website monitoring subscriptions: Root Cause Analysis (2009-10-18)

Today we release the Root Cause Analysis feature for all our website monitoring customers, at no additional cost, in all subscriptions.

What is Root Cause Analysis?

Until now, any issues found by WatchMouse were logged in your account and you were alerted according to your settings and preferences. Although the information in the alert tells you what the problem is, a more detailed analysis, or Root Cause Analysis, can be helpful in determining the actual cause of the issue.

How does it work?

When an issue is found and has been confirmed by another monitoring station (if needed), the Root Cause Analysis is triggered. Currently the Root Cause Analysis entails:

• Perform a traceroute from two monitoring stations to find the actual routes that were used in the tests.
• A screen dump (image) of the web page in question (for http(s) rules only) in two sizes
• The source HTML of the web page (for http(s) rules only) if available.
• Relevant checks: results from previous and subsequent checks for the same rule.
• A detailed analysis of your domain name set-up
• DNS analysis from two monitoring stations to see if the host names are resolved properly.

In your logs you will find this icon right next to the (confirmed) error pointing to the Root Cause Analysis report. Note that this icon will be present only for the first confirmed error in a straight sequence of errors. There is another icon that might appear indicating that the log file has additional information (e.g. for http(s), scripting, or dns/domain rules) that looks like this .

Getting started

If you had any errors reported recently there may already be Root Cause Analysis reports available in your account. To check it out go to the logs and select 'Root Cause Analyses' from the 'Display' menu and click [show].
If there are entries in the resulting list, simply click on the Root Cause Analysis icon to inspect the details.

When an alert email is sent, this will now contain a direct link to the Root Cause Analysis report.

LB Icon chooses WatchMouse for independent website monitoring (2005-01-31)

Customer websites verified from the visitors' perspective

LB Icon and WatchMouse have signed a contract for the continuous monitoring of the websites and services of LB Icons' customers. Using the WatchMouse services, LB Icon expects to raise its service level even higher.

The Application Management & Hosting Services (AM&HS) group of LB Icon maintains the administration and management of servers and applications of a large number of (international) clients. This makes AM&HS responsible for the performance and availability of the websites and Internet applications.

Using the WatchMouse services, AM&HS will instantly be aware of upcoming and/or acute incidents related to the websites of its clients, and can, as a result, resolve problems in a short time frame.
The websites and their functionality are checked for accessibility, speed and conformance from different locations around the world. Because the websites are checked in the same way that visitors are experiencing them, incidents will be detected at an early stage. Also, using WatchMouse's objective periodical reports, it is possible to see if the performance is in accordance with the agreed service levels (SLAs).

Eveline Aendekerk, MD a.i.: "The door of a shop should never be jammed, websites and the functionality on those sites should simply be accessible and available. Our clients should be able to rely on this completely, so they can focus on their primary business processes, such as communication, interaction and sales.
We chose WatchMouse because of their expertise, and also because of the simplicity and user-friendliness of their system and services".

Stan P. van de Burgt, one of the founders of WatchMouse: "I find it a powerful gesture that LB Icon doesn't just monitor the websites of their clients, but that they selected an external party for this, and on top of that give their clients access to the results. Many companies where the website plays an essential role in business, don't have any awareness of this. They have no idea of the risks and the resulting damage, until the day comes that things actually go wrong"

About Lost Boys

For 11 years Lost Boys has been a major service provider in the area of (mobile) Internet. Lost Boys offers a combination of strategy, design, technical development, implementation, application management and hosting of Internet- and mobile solutions. The Amsterdam based corporation is part of the Lost Boys/IconMedialab Group and is listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange and Euronext Amsterdam. Lost Boys operates with 600 employees in 7 countries, both in Europe and the United States.

http://www.lostboys.nl/
http://iconmedialab.com/

About WatchMouse

WatchMouse is a service of RoundZero. Since 2001, WatchMouse has been checking Internet sites and e-commerce applications of major companies all over the world. The WatchMouse services are available in 8 languages and analysis is performed through its worldwide monitoring network at different locations and networks. WatchMouse has thousands of users in more than 70 countries.

http://www.watchmouse.com/

Dutch e-commerce sites poorly prepared for Christmas rush (2004-12-14)

Only 20% achieve maximum availability

UTRECHT, 20041205 -- Many Dutch e-commerce sites have made only minimal preparations for the increased number of visitors in December. The congestion caused by Sinterklaas [traditional Dutch celebration on 5 December] meant that, on average, only one in six sites was continuously available. This was the conclusion of WatchMouse, a Dutch monitoring site, following a survey of 25 e-commerce sites. Even worse figures are expected during the weeks before Christmas. Excessive interest from customers can overload the server or have dramatic effect on response times.

During the past month, WatchMouse – at its own initiative – closely monitored 25 sites where consumers can shop online, such as Bol.com, Wehkamp, Free Record Shop, De Bijenkorf, ECI, Bart Smit, Dixons and Bruna. The survey shows that the 'up time' – the time during which the server is online – varied from 98% to 99.6%. "This may seem high, but a score of 98% means that a site is not available for half an hour per day. This makes 14 hours a month, or a week a year", says Mark Pors, one of the founders of WatchMouse.

The consequences of this are reflected not only in loss of income. Pors: "A website that is not available can cause stacks of work for a helpdesk and, at the end of the day, damage the brand’s image. The problem is that many website owners are unaware that sites are responding poorly, or not at all. If they were aware of this, taking action to intervene is simplicity itself: for example, by adding extra server capacity."

WatchMouse has concluded from its survey that only 20% of the sites have achieved optimum accessibility. Given the increasing trend in online purchases, gigantic sums are involved. In the first six months of 2004, online expenditure rose to € 775 million; a 35% increase. Each online shopper spent € 227 from January through June of this year (Blauw Research, September 2004).

December is also a top month for purchasing on the internet. Pors: "We saw response times and the number of error reports increase dramatically in the days leading up to Sinterklaas. This does not bode well for the even busier period before Christmas."

WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor their internet sites themselves, thanks to WatchMouse’s monitoring service.

WatchMouse has been monitoring internet sites and e-commerce applications for companies across the globe since 2001. WatchMouse has thousands of users in more than 70 countries. WatchMouse services are available in seven languages, and analyses are carried out through the world-wide monitoring network from a range of locations and networks.

WatchMouse opens new monitoring stations in China and London (2005-01-12)

Largest monitoring network world-wide.

UTRECHT, 20041210 -- WatchMouse, active in monitoring websites world-wide, has opened two new monitoring stations: in Hong Kong and London. At the same time, the company’s station in Sydney, Australia, has been completely renewed. With this expansion, WatchMouse is responding to the explosive growth in interest in real-time site monitoring from e-commerce companies. With nine stations, the Utrecht-based company is now the largest monitoring network world-wide.

Thanks to rapidly increasing online expenditure via the Internet, services such as WatchMouse are undergoing significant development. A monitoring station provides insight into the availability of e-commerce sites, the speed of these sites and response times. Research performed among Dutch websites by WatchMouse has demonstrated that many sites are still missing out in this area. Mark Pors, one of the founders of WatchMouse: “As spending online is growing by tens of percentage points each year, it is in the interest of sites to obtain insight into how they are functioning. A server that is poorly accessible for half an hour or more a day loses lots of money. Companies are increasingly recognising that they are losing out, both in terms of turnover and image. Not only in the Netherlands, but also elsewhere. For this reason, we are setting up stations in more countries.”

Local testing

By creating a larger spread among the control stations, sites can be monitored from more points throughout the world. WatchMouse is responding to increasing demand from clients for a world-wide picture of site availability. WatchMouse’s clients can also stipulate a preferred station for 'local' testing. For this reason, China and Great Britain have been added as two strategically important markets for e-commerce. The Utrecht company’s other stations operate from Florida, Texas, Sydney, Nuremberg, Orleans, Amsterdam and Singapore.

WatchMouse

WatchMouse has been monitoring internet sites and e-commerce applications for companies all over the world since 2001. WatchMouse has thousands of clients in more than 70 countries. The company’s services are available in seven languages, analyses are performed from a range of locations and networks via the world-wide monitoring network.

This press release in Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese

European e-commerce sites poorly prepared for Christmas rush (2004-12-24)

Comparison with US "role models" Amazon and Barnes & Noble

THE NETHERLANDS, 20041223 -- Many European e-commerce sites have made only minimal preparations for the increased number of visitors in December. The congestion caused by Christmas meant that, on average, only one in six web sites was continuously available. This was the conclusion of WatchMouse, a Dutch monitoring service provider, following a survey of over 50 European e-commerce sites. Excessive interest from customers can overload the server or have dramatic effect on response times.

During the past month, WatchMouse – at its own initiative – closely monitored over 50 web sites where consumers can shop online. The survey shows that the availability varied from 98% to 99.6%. "This may seem high, but a score of 98% means that a site is not available for half an hour per day. This makes 14 hours a month, or a week a year", says Mark Pors, one of the founders of WatchMouse.

As a comparison to the US market, two "role models of e-commerce" - amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com - were monitored during the same period. Amazon`s performance was similar to that of the average European web shop, whereas Barns & Noble outperformed most e-commerce sites with an uptime of 100%.

The consequences of downtime are reflected not only in loss of income. Pors: "A website that is not available can cause stacks of work for your helpdesk and, at the end of the day, damage your brand. The problem is that many website owners are unaware that sites are responding poorly, or not responding at all. If they were aware of this, taking action to intervene is simplicity itself: for example, by adding extra server capacity."

WatchMouse has concluded from its survey that more than 70% of the web sites have not achieved optimum accessibility. Given the increasing trend in online purchases, gigantic sums are involved: Online sales will increase by 44% to €13 billion ($17 billion) in Western Europe over the holidays period, compared to €10 billion ($13 billion) in the US (Forrester Research, November 2004).

December is a top month for purchasing on the internet. Pors: "We see response times and the number of error reports increase dramatically in the days leading up to Christmas."

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor their internet sites themselves, thanks to WatchMouse’s monitoring service.

WatchMouse has been monitoring internet sites and e-commerce applications for companies across the globe since 2001. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in more than 70 countries. WatchMouse services are available in seven languages, and analyses are carried out through the world-wide monitoring network from a range of locations and networks.

WatchMouse publishes first 'Site Availability Index' (2005-06-28)

Only 9 out of 25 funds listed on the Amsterdam stock exchange have sites with good availability

Of the websites of the 25 funds listed on the Amsterdam stock exchange (AEX), only nine display optimal availability. The availability of the other sites, including those of multinationals, ranges from poor to dramatically poor. Unilever has the best result of all websites, with an uptime of 99.995%. The site with the lowest availability is that of Wolters-Kluwer, with an uptime of 94.80%, which represents more than 37 hours of poor performance, or even unavailability, per month. This was the conclusion drawn from the first Site Availability Index created by WatchMouse, a company supplying monitoring services for websites and e-commerce applications world-wide.

An uptime of 99.9% is seen as the minimum acceptable level. This percentage is also often quoted in service level agreements (SLAs) with hosting providers. In order to determine the extent to which the sites of AEX funds achieve satisfactory uptime, WatchMouse monitored the sites for more than two months. Downtime was said to occur if a site was not available or did not respond within 8 seconds.

The Site Availability Index for AEX funds (www.watchmouse.com/bereikbaarheidsindex/2005/AEX.html) showed that only nine funds fulfilled the minimum required level of 99.9%. These were Unilever, Philips, AEGON, Numico, Akzo Nobel, ASML Holding, Kon. P&O Nedlloyd, Versatel and Buhrmann. Bringing up the rear were IT company(!) Getronics (96.87%), DSM (96.75%), and Wolters-Kluwer, which with a score of 94.80% is over a day and a half a month ‘off the air’.

The Site Availability Index for AEX funds is an initiative of Emerce and WatchMouse and will be repeated annually.

"Very surprised"

Mark Pors, chief technology officer at WatchMouse, stated that he was "very surprised" by the results. "With many sites, we found an uptime that is worse than that of many smaller companies. And this while AEX funds in particular should attach a great deal of priority to their corporate image. A maximum uptime is part of the 'brand performance'. Our theory is that, where there are a lot of people involved within an organisation, there are a lot of hands unplugging cables, so to speak. These companies have complex processes, a great many internal changes are made, and outsourcing of various activities means transparency is often at a premium. This is clearly the case with Getronics, for example. The uptime of the site at the weekend is 100%, but during the week, when people are working, this decreases dramatically."

Pors suspects that the popularity of the sites could also be a reason for poor availability. "Naturally, sites belonging to AEX funds get a lot more traffic than the smaller businesses. On the other hand, this is no excuse; if we look at large online brokers in the US, for example, all achieve an uptime in excess of 99.9%."

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor their own internet sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has been monitoring internet sites and e-commerce applications for companies throughout the world since 2001. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in more than 70 countries. The services supplied by WatchMouse are available in eight languages, and analyses are performed from various locations and over numerous networks, using a world-wide monitoring network.

In June 2005, WatchMouse was selected by FEM Business as one of the 25 most promising, innovative companies in the Netherlands.

Further information can be found at: www.watchmouse.com.

Rapidly growing WatchMouse wins Deloitte’s Rising Star award (2005-09-23)

WatchMouse is one of the three winners of Deloitte’s Rising Star award. This award is presented annually to rapidly expanding technology companies less than five years old. WatchMouse has been active worldwide for three years in the area of site and server monitoring. With 16 monitoring stations throughout the world, WatchMouse monitors the availability of customers’ websites, immediately sounding the alarm in the event of problems.

The Rising Stars are presented as part of the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 ceremony, the fifty most rapidly expanding technology businesses. The Rising Stars have the potential to lead the Technology Fast 50 in the near future. Stan van de Burgt (42), Niels Eijsbroek (40) and Mark Pors (38) first came up with the idea for WatchMouse in 2001. The concept was as unique as it was clear: to monitor the availability of sites and servers by constantly simulating web traffic. If a site is not responding or an error is found, the customer is notified immediately by SMS, pager, IM or e-mail. From the moment the concept went 'live', in 2002, the pace has been frenetic: turnover doubled each year. Web sites are now monitored from sixteen monitoring stations worldwide 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The WatchMouse application is entirely web-based: customers do not have to install software or hardware at their site, and the application excels in its self-service aspects while staying easy to use. This allows WatchMouse to operate with a small core of permanent employees, supplemented by external support. Prospective customers can specify their requirements in detail on the WatchMouse site. A range of starter packages is available, priced from € 17.50 per month up to € 450 per month. 400 paying customers in 40 countries worldwide now make use of WatchMouse’s services. These include hosting companies, government bodies, and companies such as LB Icon, Scania, Siemens, Orange, ING, GeoTrust, Citibank, and Postbank.

Self-service as a success factor

Mark Pors, Chief Technology Officer, says he was “pleasantly surprised by the award”. “I am very happy that the jury shares our vision of self-service and our market approach." Pors sees WatchMouse as “the right initiative at the right moment. Companies are increasingly looking to outsource non-core tasks. However, they want to be able to guide and control this themselves and from their own workplace. Web-based services make this possible." Stan van de Burgt, CEO, sees the simplicity of the WatchMouse site and the various languages in which it is available as the major success factors. "Monitoring websites was an idea that already existed in essence, but had not been worked out in this form. We are geared tightly to 'self service', whereby customers can set up everything themselves and retain total control. Which also means we are able to offer the service at a more attractive price than other players in the market.”

The Rising Star awards were presented on Thursday, 22 September.

WatchMouse

WatchMouse assesses your website and e-commerce applications just like your customers experience them. The checks are carried out from 16 monitoring stations worldwide, and recorded in regular reports. In the event of errors or availability problems, the right people within your organisation will be alerted.

www.watchmouse.com

Meerderheid e-commerce sites kan komende kerstdrukte niet aan (2009-05-14)

WatchMouse voorziet wachtende e-shoppers

UTRECHT 20051201 -- Nu de decemberinkopen weer in alle hevigheid zijn losgebarsten, blijken veel online shops regelmatig 'gesloten' te zijn. Dat concludeert WatchMouse in haar jaarlijkse bereikbaarheidsonderzoek van cadeausites. Het Nederlandse sitemonitoringbedrijf heeft net als vorig jaar een onderzoek gehouden onder webwinkels. Slechts drie sites in het onderzoek haalden de maximale 100%. Het merendeel haalt zelfs niet de score die door hosting providers wordt aangehouden als absoluut minimum.

Veel sites zijn maar matig voorbereid op grote aantallen bezoekers. Door de grote belangstelling raken servers regelmatig overbelast. Ook blijken reactietijden van sites dramatisch dalen. Het onderzoek dat WatchMouse in de weken voor Sinterklaas heeft gehouden, laat duidelijk zien dat sites problemen vertonen naarmate er meer bezoekers in de webwinkels verschijnen.

Om te controleren of e-commerce sites goed bereikbaar zijn, heeft WatchMouse de hele maand november controles uitgevoerd. De uptime bleek regelmatig onder de 99.9% te liggen, een grens die in veel service level agreements (SLAs) van hosting providers geldt als minimum. Dat percentage wordt maar door tien van de 25 sites gehaald. Neckermann, Bonaparte en eBay zijn de enigen met een score van 100%. Vorig jaar waren er nog zes sites die een maximale uptime haalden.

De bereikbaarheid van Kijkshop, Bart Smit, de Bijenkorf en Wehkamp blijkt verre van optimaal. De score van Wehkamp, 97.27%, betekent bijvoorbeeld dat deze site per dag meer dan een half uur slecht bereikbaar is.

De grootste stijger was Bonaparte (kleding) die van de 17e plaats in 2004 steeg naar een gedeelde eerste plaats. eBay bleef als enige twee jaar achtereen op 1. De grootste daler was ECI die van een gedeelde eerste plaats in 2005 naar de 23ste plaats zakte.

In het licht van de toenemende bestedingen online kan de economische schade voor een site groot zijn. In de eerste zes maanden van dit jaar is er online ruim een miljard euro besteed, concludeert de Thuiswinkel Markt Monitor 2005. De online bestedingen maken met 37% ten opzichte van dezelfde periode vorig jaar bovendien een snelle groei door.

Consument gewend aan snelheid

"In vergelijking met vorig jaar zijn effectieve maatregelen uitgebleven", zegt Mark Pors, CTO van WatchMouse. "Consumenten zijn gewend aan snelheid op internet. Moeten ze wachten op een site, dan blijken ze zeker voor decembercadeaus gemakkelijk naar een andere site te gaan. Veel bedrijven weten echter niet dat hun sites matig bereikbaar zijn.”

Opvallend zijn verder de sites die 100% halen. Pors: “Twee van de drie blijken in het buitenland gehost te worden. Waarschijnlijk is men in de VS (eBay) en Duitsland (Bonaparte) wel gewend de sites goed te dimensioneren”.

Vorig jaar bleek de kerstperiode overigens nog drukker dan de periode voor Sinterklaas. Om die reden zal WatchMouse ook in de weken voor kerst blijven monitoren. Vlak voor kerst verwacht WatchMouse met de resultaten te komen van die tweede testperiode.

Het onderzoek liep van 1 t/m 30 november 2005. Van 'downtime' is sprake als een site een foutmelding geeft of de HTML na acht seconden niet ontvangen is, en dit vanuit een tweede meetpunt bevestigd is. Het complete bereikbaarheidsonderzoek is te vinden op: http://www.watchmouse.com/availabilityindex/2005/eshops_NL.php

Over WatchMouse

Bedrijven kunnen eenvoudig hun websites controleren door gebruik te maken van de monitoringdienst van WatchMouse. WatchMouse controleert sinds 2002 Internetsites en e-commerce toepassingen van bedrijven over de hele wereld. WatchMouse heeft duizenden klanten in meer dan 70 landen. De dienst is beschikbaar in acht talen en de analyses worden uitgevoerd vanuit een groot aantal locaties in het wereldwijde WatchMouse monitoring netwerk. Eerder dit jaar werd WatchMouse uitgeroepen tot Rising Star in de Deloitte Fast 50. Deze award wordt jaarlijks toegekend aan snel groeiende technologiebedrijven die nog geen vijf jaar bestaan

WatchMouse develops monitoring widget for Apple users (download widget) (2005-10-21)

WatchMouse has developed a new widget for dashboard, aimed at Internet site monitoring.

NETHERLANDS, 2005-10-13. By means of the widget Apple users can get direct insight into the accessibility of their own Internet site. The widget can be downloaded for free from the Apple website. Last month, WatchMouse was voted a Deloitte Rising Star in the Netherlands, as part of the Fast 50 awards; the list of the 50 fastest growing technology companies.

In 2002, WatchMouse (www.watchmouse.com) introduced a new concept for Internet site monitoring. By means of ongoing simulations of Internet traffic the accessibility of sites and servers is checked. If a site is not responding, an alert message is sent immediately through SMS, telephone, Instant Messenger or e-mail. The sites are checked from sixteen monitoring stations worldwide. This is done 24 hours per day, seven days per week. The service is completely web based: customers don't have to install software, everything is 100% self-service, which keeps the costs low.

The three founders of WatchMouse, Niels Eijsbroek, Stan van de Burgt and Mark Pors are enormous Mac-fans with a total of fifteen Macs in their possession. The monitoring widget is quite unique: it is a combination of a desktop and a hosted application. When the widgets detects a problem with the site it is checking, it alerts the user with a 'beep', followed by the launch of a web browser, which is directed to a web application on watchmouse.com. There the site is checked from 16 different locations worldwide.

Every five minutes

Every five minutes the dashboard widget checks one or more sites from the users own computer. Also, the availability of the site during the last 72 hours is registered. A problem is followed by an alert, which is then verified by all WatchMouse control stations.

WatchMouse has made the widget available free of charge "because we have become addicted to it, ever since we started using the first beta version of the widget", says CCO Niels Eijsbroek. "We give the widget away for free mainly for the fun part. And of course it's also important to bring site monitoring to the attention of our fellow Apple-users."

The free WatchMouse site monitoring widget can be downloaded from the Apple website:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/networking_security/watchmousesitemonitor.html

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor their own Internet sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has been monitoring Internet sites and e-commerce applications for companies throughout the world since 2002. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in more than 70 countries. The services supplied by WatchMouse are available in eight languages, and analysis are performed from various locations and over numerous networks, using a world-wide monitoring network.

Further information can be found at: www.watchmouse.com

Minitel Beats the Internet When it Comes to Availability (2005-10-27)

UTRECHT The Netherlands, October 24, 2005 -- Minitel, the eighties precursor to the Internet, is more reliable than most of the top French Internet sites. This is the conclusion from a research by WatchMouse, a monitoring service company for Internet sites worldwide. For two months WatchMouse monitored twenty sites which offer similar information to their Minitel-equivalent, and found that not one of these sites is 100% available.

According to WatchMouse, Minitel still has a future. Many organisations which offer services both through Minitel and the Internet, cannot deliver 100% website availability. Of the twenty sites which were monitored, only three had an 'uptime' of 99.9% which is considered as the 'minimum acceptable'. This percentage is frequently used in service level agreements (SLA's) by host providers. The best performing websites were verif.fr (3617 VERIF) with 99.99%, socgen.com (3615 SG) with an uptime of 99.95%, and alapage.com with 99.92%.

At the bottom of the ranking were anpe.fr (ANPE 3614) with 98.18% and bnpnet.bnp.fr, (BNP 3614) with 97.99%. This makes the BNP site the worst performer, by being unavailable or performing poorly for almost 15 hours per month. For the full list see http://www.watchmouse.com/pr/watchmouse_minitel.php

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor their own Internet sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has been monitoring Internet sites and e-commerce applications for companies throughout the world since 2002. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in more than 70 countries. The services supplied by WatchMouse are available in eight languages, and analyses are performed from various locations and over numerous networks, using a world-wide monitoring network.

Last month, WatchMouse was voted a Deloitte Rising Star in the Netherlands, as part of the Fast 50 awards; the list of the 50 fastest growing technology companies.

Further information can be found at: www.watchmouse.com

Spanish websites suffer from poor performance (2005-12-04)

WatchMouse research shows that 71% of IBEX websites availability is below industry standards

MADRID, 20051121 - Of the top 35 funds listed on the Bolsa de Madrid (IBEX), 25 have websites with poor to dramatically poor availability. Many of the sites are badly accessible or unavailable for more than an hour per month.

The worst site, that of Antena 3 TV, is even unavailable for an equivalent of more than 8 days per month.

This was the conclusion drawn from the first Spanish Site Availability Index created by WatchMouse, a company supplying monitoring services for websites and e-commerce applications worldwide. In order to determine the extent to which the sites of IBEX funds achieve a satisfactory uptime, WatchMouse monitored the sites continuously between October 23 and November 11, 2005. Every five minutes, one of WatchMouse’s test stations tried to access the homepage of the site, which was expected to download within 8 seconds, without any errors.

An uptime of 99.9% is seen as the minimum acceptable level. This percentage is also often quoted in service level agreements (SLAs) with hosting providers. There were only five sites which achieved perfect 100% availability - Sogecable, Arcelor, FCC, BSCH and Altadis. The availability of the three worst performers was less than 95%; Acerinox (94.66%), Gamesa (86.54%) and Antena 3 TV with 73.05%.

Mark Pors, chief technology officer at WatchMouse, stated that he was "very surprised" by the results. "With several sites, we found an uptime that was worse than that of many smaller companies. This is worrying as IBEX funds in particular should give a great deal of priority to their corporate image. Maximum uptime should be part of the overall 'brand performance'."

Pors suspects that for some sites, the popularity could be a reason for poor availability. "Some of the sites belonging to IBEX funds will get a lot of traffic. However, this is no excuse; if we look at large online brokers in the US, for example, all achieve an uptime in excess of 99.9%."

A complete overview of the monitoring results of the WatchMouse Site Availability Index, listing the 35 sites, can be found on http://www.watchmouse.com/en/availabilityindex/2005/IBEX.php

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor their own Internet sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has been monitoring Internet sites and e-commerce applications for companies throughout the world since 2002. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in more than 70 countries. The services supplied by WatchMouse are available in eight languages, and analysis are performed from various locations and over numerous networks, using a world-wide monitoring network.

Further information can be found at: www.watchmouse.com

WatchMouse and Domeny.pl join forces in the Polish market (2005-11-24)

Polish websites verified from the visitors' perspective

Kraków, Poland, 2005-11-08 -- WatchMouse and Domeny signed a reseller and marketing agreement today, joining forces in bringing site monitoring services to the Polish market.

Using the WatchMouse services, companies will instantly be aware of upcoming and/or acute incidents related to its web sites of their clients, and can, as a result, resolve problems in a short time frame.

The websites and their functionality are checked for availability, speed, and conformance from different locations around the world, now including Poland. Because the websites are checked in the same way that visitors are experiencing them, incidents will be detected at an early stage. Also, using WatchMouse's objective periodical reports, it is possible for companies to see if the performance is in accordance with the agreed service levels (SLAs).

WatchMouse extends its network of monitoring stations with a checkpoint in Kraków, hosted by Domeny.pl. The total number of checkpoints is now 17. Domeny.pl also provides the Polish language version of the WatchMouse site and local customer care.

Stan P. van de Burgt, CEO of WatchMouse: "I'm very happy with this deal. The Polish e-service industry is obviously booming, and this results in higher awareness of the issues involved with running web applications that should be available around the clock."

Arkadiusz Szczurowski, CEO of Domeny.pl "We know that WatchMouse products are one of the best in the World. So we decided to co-operate with the company, and we take pride in it. We expect this co-operation to bring both WatchMouse and our business a lot of advantages and satisfaction. Domeny.pl wants to lead WatchMouse monitoring service on Polish market and offer it for business leaders. This will be a great innovation in Poland and also success. In our view, site monitoring is important, because stability, performance, and high availability of the web sites is one of the basic value in all branches of business, both e-business and other business."

"There are about 4 million companies in Poland. We want to direct the offer to the most important on Polish market. We think that the WatchMouse service is a must-have for about 5-10 percent of all business owners."

About Domeny.pl

Domeny.pl was founded in 1997 and is now providing Internet services to about 10.000 business customers with products ranging from Internet domains and hosting services (virtual and dedicated servers), SSL certificates and other products dealing with internet security. The company's slogan is: We're Trusted by the Best. Among its clients are the biggest and the best known Polish and international companies.

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor their own Internet sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has been monitoring Internet sites and e-commerce applications for companies throughout the world since 2002. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in more than 70 countries. The services supplied by WatchMouse are available in nine languages, and analyses are performed from various locations and over numerous networks, using a world-wide monitoring network.

In October 2005, WatchMouse was voted a Deloitte Rising Star in the Netherlands, as part of the Fast 50 awards the list of the 50 fastest growing technology companies.

"Websites bezwijken onder de Sneeuw" (2009-05-14)

Sites met verkeersinformatie en openbaar vervoer kunnen de vraag naar informatie niet aan. UTRECHT 25-11-2005 -- De websites van o.a. de Nederlandse Spoorwegen, de Verkeersinformatiedienst (VID), en de ANWB hadden het zwaar vrijdag. Door het slechte weer was er veel behoefte aan informatie over het weer, de toestand van de wegen, en de vertragingen op het spoor. Deze belangrijke sites waren echter zeer slecht bereikbaar. Ook waren er regelmatig foutmeldingen op de sites te zien op plekken op de sites waar normaal actuele informatie staat. Dit rapporteert WatchMouse, het site en servermonitoringbedrijf uit Utrecht. Mark Pors, CTO van WatchMouse: "Het was de hele dag 'zwaar weer' voor deze sites, maar in de loop van de middag werd het echt druk". De Verkeersinformatiedienst gaf zelf aan vier keer zoveel bezoekers te hebben als normaal en besloot over te gaan op een "minimale site" (een site met alleen statische informatie, en weinig grafische elementen) bij aanvang van de avondspits. De NS besloten een eenvoudige pagina met de belangrijkste informatie voor de eigenlijke homepage te plaatsen. De ANWB zag meer dan een verdubbeling van het aantal bezoekers. Een veel gehoorde opmerking was "Hierop kun je simpelweg niet anticiperen". Mark Pors zegt hierover: "Dat is natuurlijk hetzelfde als zeggen dat je niet kunt anticiperen op bladeren op de rails in de herfst. Je kunt dit soort dingen heel goed vooraf testen en een draaiboek klaar hebben voor dergelijke gebeurtenissen". Bedrijven kunnen op piekbelasting anticiperen door het uitvoeren van load en stresstesten, en het daadwerkelijke gedrag van sites doorlopend monitoren, en bij calamiteiten een noodplan activeren. Het inzetten van een vereenvoudigde versie van de site en het uitschakelen van elementen die veel van de servers vergen, was ook bij de grote terroristische aanslagen in de afgelopen jaren een beproefde methode. Overigens moet het draaiboek ook beschrijven hoe weer over te gaan op de oorspronkelijke versie van de site. Pors: "De sites bleken het ook laat in de avond zwaar te hebben. Sommige sites, waaronder die van de ANWB waren helemaal niet meer bereikbaar, en die van WID gaf veel foutmeldingen. Mogelijk was dat wegens 'reparatiewerkzaamheden' aan deze sites" Na 23:00 was de rust wedergekeerd. Er waren ook positieve zaken op te merken. Zo was de site van het KNMI doorlopend goed bereikbaar en leek de site van OVR ook weinig problemen te hebben.

US online stockbroker beats UK counterpart (2005-12-11)

WatchMouse report favourable on availability US stockbroker sites

UTRECHT, NL, 20051206 -- The websites of US online stockbrokers have an excellent availability record. This was one of the findings in a research by WatchMouse, a company providing monitoring services for websites and e-commerce applications worldwide. Of the 29 US websites that were covered by the research, 18 have an uptime percentage of 99.9% or better, and as many as 10 of these reached the perfect 100% mark.

This makes the US online brokers perform significantly better than their UK counterparts: at a similar research in the UK, just one out of 16 websites researched is available continuously, and five are listed at 99.9%. An uptime level of 99.9% is generally seen as the minimum acceptable level and is often quoted in service level agreements (SLAs) with hosting providers or in-house IT departments.

With a growing percentage of the stock market taking place on the Internet, it becomes ever more important to always be available, with the fastest possible response time. Mark Pors, CTO at WatchMouse claims: "Even more than shopping sites, stockbroker sites cannot afford to be unavailable- the stock business is an always-on business"

In order to determine the extent to which the online stockbrokers achieve satisfactory availability, WatchMouse monitored the websites during the official trading hours of the New York (NYSE) and London stock exchange respectively. During a period of two months, October through November, every five minutes, one of WatchMouse’s monitoring stations accessed the customer login page of the website, which was then expected to download within 8 seconds, without any errors.

The differences are remarkable: US brokers have- almost without exception- a very high availability. Ameritrade Plus, Bank One, Charles Schwab, Cititrade, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Quick and Reilly, Tradingdirect, USAA, and Wellsfargo, were all continuously available throughout the research period. Another eight sites displayed a 99.9% uptime. Not one of the US brokers reported an uptime below the 99% mark. Still, AB Watley Direct, last on the list at 99.04%, adds up to a 1 hours and 20 minutes downtime per month during trading hours.

In the UK the results are far worse. Only Alliance-Leicester maintained the 100% availability, and five others are at 99.9% or up. Two of the 16 UK brokers were even tagged with a "poor availability". Stocktrade is difficult to reach almost two hours per month and Fasttrade a whopping five hours, both during trading hours.

Still, the online stockbrokers have a significantly higher uptime average than other sectors, such as e-shops, government, and news media. WatchMouse reports on these sectors on a regular basis with their 'availability index'.

Online trading trouble

Mark Pors, emphasises the importance of a high uptime for online stockbrokers: "With online securities transactions, the site should be very responsive. After hitting the 'confirm button', you should never have to question whether the order was placed correctly or not. Online brokers understand the importance of being online, and having a fast response time during trading hours."

A complete overview of the monitoring results of the WatchMouse Site Availability Index, listing the US and UK online brokers, can be found on http://www.watchmouse.com/availabilityindex/2005/uk-us-brokers.php

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor their own Internet sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has been monitoring Internet sites and e-commerce applications for companies throughout the world since 2002. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in more than 70 countries. The services supplied by WatchMouse are available in eight languages, and analyses are performed from various locations and over numerous networks, using a world-wide monitoring network.

WatchMouse was voted a Deloitte Rising Star in the Netherlands, as part of the 2005 Fast 50 awards; the list of the 50 fastest growing technology companies.

Further information can be found at: www.watchmouse.com

Spanish e-tailers not ready for Xmas shopping rush (2005-12-09)

WatchMouse research reveals weaknesses of Spanish online shops

Not a single Spanish webshop has an uptime of 100%, and only one out of 10 meets the regular industry availability standards. This is the conclusion of a research by WatchMouse, one of the fastest growing companies in the Netherlands, and winner of the Deloite Rising Star award in 2005.

WatchMouse has been monitoring the main ten Spanish webshops for 38 days, to find out if they are going to be able to handle the Christmas rush. The results of the WatchMouse Availability Index for Spanish e-tailers are poor. "We predict a long wait for internet customers this Christmas season, as Spanish e-shops don't seem to be ready to handle the increased traffic. In a fairly quiet period the performance has already been below standard. The extra volume of online shoppers before Christmas will definitely cause problems, and may even bring some sites down completely", says Mark Pors, CTO WatchMouse.

"According to recent research by the Asociación Española de Comercio Electrónico, retail e-trade in Spain reached some 1.8 billion euros in 2004. So there are big amounts at stake here. If customers cannot get through on a website, or are experiencing a long wait, they often decide to visit a competitive site, causing webshops to lose deals, and even risk losing loyal customers for good."

WatchMouse monitored the top ten Spanish e-tailers continuously from October 25 until December 2. Every 5 minutes, one of WatchMouse’s test stations tried to access the homepage of the site, which is expected to download within 8 seconds, without any errors. An uptime of 99.9% is seen as the minimum acceptable level. This percentage is also often quoted in service level agreements (SLAs) with hosting providers.

Of the ten websites monitored, there was only one meeting this requirement: Carrefour. Mercadona and AreaPC were the sites with the worst availability, showing a respective downtime of an equivalent of 10 and 16 hours over the 38-day testing period. In comparison: the main US e-tailers, such as eBay and Amazon all have 100% uptime, which shows perfect availability can be achieved.

A complete overview of the monitoring results of the 10 sites can be found on http://www.watchmouse.com/availabilityindex/2005/eshops-es.php
WatchMouse will continue to monitor the performance of the ten Spanish etailers over the Christmas period and will publish its findings in January 2006.

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor their own Internet sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has been monitoring Internet sites and e-commerce applications for companies throughout the world since 2002. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in more than 70 countries. The services supplied by WatchMouse are available in eight languages, and analyses are performed from various locations and over numerous networks, using a world-wide monitoring network.

Further information can be found at: www.watchmouse.com.

Spanish banks closed for online business (2006-02-14)

WatchMouse research reveals most Spanish Internet banks struggle to offer reliable access to customers

Madrid, January 10, 2006 - Only one out of 31 Spanish banks offering Internet banking, has a login page available 100% of the time. Added to this, only 5 of the Internet banks' login pages monitored meets the regular industry availability standards.

This is the conclusion of a research by WatchMouse, one of the fastest growing companies in the Netherlands, and winner of the Deloitte Rising Star award in 2005. The company has been monitoring the Internet banking portals of the main Spanish banks for 2 months, and has found them to be well below acceptable service standards.

"One of the primary aims of Internet banking is 24 hour, 365 day access to account information. Sadly, Spanish customers are finding that this is far from the case. One bank's online banking portal login page was even unavailable 11 percent of the time - which inevitably means poor service for its clients", says Mark Pors, CTO at WatchMouse. "Customers of this bank have no guarantee they will be able to access their money when they need to make an urgent transfer."

Of the 31 banks whose sites were monitored, only BBVA's login page was 100% available. An uptime of 99.9% is seen as the minimum acceptable level, but 80% of the banks were unable to offer that.

Caja Cantabria has the worst performing online banking portal, showing downtime equivalent to more than 3 days over the 2-month testing period (11 percent of the time). Banco Urquijo was second worst, with a total downtime of more than one day over the testing period.

As a comparison: the main US brokers, such as Morgan Stanley, Cititrade and Wellsfargo all have 100% uptime, which provides a benchmark for availability in the financial world.

WatchMouse monitored the 31 Spanish banks' websites continuously from November 6, 2005 until January 5, 2006. Every 5 minutes, one of WatchMouse's test stations tried to access the login pages of the bank's Internet banking portals, which are expected to load within 8 seconds, without any errors.

Besides the Internet banking portals, WatchMouse also checked the availability of the home page of each Internet bank, plus 19 other banks that don't offer Internet banking. Of these 50 homepages in total, none had a homepage with 100% availability and only 11 of the 50 are meeting industry standards.

A complete overview of results can be found on http://www.watchmouse.com/availabilityindex/2006/banks-es.php

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor their own Internet sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has been monitoring Internet sites and e-commerce applications for companies throughout the world since 2002. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in more than 70 countries. The services supplied by WatchMouse are available in eight languages, and analyses are performed from various locations and over numerous networks, using a world-wide monitoring network.

Further information can be found at: www.watchmouse.com.

Lazio tops Serie A internet league - Chievo Verona relegated to Web also-rans - (2006-02-07)

UTRECHT, February 7, 2006 - Lazio, AC Milan, Treviso and Empoli FC lead the way in Serie A performance - on the web, rather than the pitch.

WatchMouse, a monitoring service that checks the availability of websites worldwide, spent two months following the twenty clubs in Serie A. If a site is not available or there is no response within eight seconds, this is classified as downtime. The results of the research make worrying reading for some of the world's 'super clubs'.

Only two Serie A teams achieved a 'satisfactory' score - namely more than 99.9% accessibility (or 0.1% downtime), which is seen as the minimum. The 'real' leader of the pack, Juventus, was back in eighth place.

Chievo Verona finds itself adrift in last place. In other words, fans of that club can assume that the club's site will be unavailable for a total of three days a month. In fact their supporters may be better advised to look for another team: with a score of 89.89%, the present number six in the 'real' table, performs not much better than the site of the trattoria round the corner.

The results were not encouraging for Serie A fans. Only Lazio and AC Milan made the 'Champions League' of availability, with scores which exceeded the 99.9% benchmark.

"Of course, scores of 99% look encouraging, concludes Mark Pors, WatchMouse's chief technology officer. "However the internet is an increasingly important communications channel for football clubs. Teams playing at the top level have a supporter base spread across the world, and the Internet is the primary channel for reaching them. Fans wanting to look something up on the internet expect a site to be continuously available. If it's not, they could take their affiliation and custom elsewhere."

Pors is surprised that clubs in Serie A, many of which have a considerable reputation, have not got their house in order on the internet. "For most of the sites, we are seeing an uptime that is poorer than that of many very small companies. Now, more than ever, football is big business with billions of customers. Clubs which fail to understand this will be unable to compete financially or on the pitch in years to come."

A complete overview of results can be found on http://www.watchmouse.com/availabilityindex/2006/serie-a-it.php

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor their own Internet sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has been monitoring Internet sites and e-commerce applications for companies throughout the world since 2002. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in more than 70 countries. The services supplied by WatchMouse are available in eight languages, and analyses are performed from various locations and over numerous networks, using a world-wide monitoring network.

Further information can be found at: www.watchmouse.com.

FTSE 100 websites suffer from poor performance (2006-04-13)

WatchMouse research shows that 57% of FTSE 100 websites availability is below industry standards

London, April 18, 2006 - Of the 100 companies listed on the FTSE, 57 have websites with poor availability. Many of the sites are badly accessible or unavailable for more than an hour per month.

The worst site, that of United Utilities, is even unavailable for an equivalent of more than 5 days per month.

This was the conclusion drawn from the WatchMouse Site Availability Index for the FTSE 100, created by WatchMouse, a company supplying monitoring services for websites and e-commerce applications worldwide. In order to determine the extent to which the sites of FTSE 100 achieve a satisfactory uptime, WatchMouse monitored the sites continuously between March 2 and April 10, 2006. Every five minutes, one of WatchMouse’s test stations tried to access the homepage of the site, which was expected to download within 8 seconds, without any errors.

An uptime of 99.9% is seen as the minimum acceptable level. This percentage is also often quoted in service level agreements (SLAs) with hosting providers. There were fourteen sites which achieved perfect 100% availability. The availability of the two worst performers was less than 91%; Scottish Power (90.78%) and United Utilities (81.53%).

Mark Pors, chief technology officer at WatchMouse, stated that he was "very surprised" by the results. "With several sites, we found an uptime that was worse than that of many smaller companies. This is worrying as the FTSE companies in particular should give a great deal of priority to their corporate image. Maximum uptime should be part of the overall 'brand performance'."

Pors suspects that for some sites, the popularity could be a reason for poor availability. "Some of the sites belonging to FTSE 100 will get a lot of traffic. However, this is no excuse; if we look at large online brokers in the US, for example, all achieve an uptime in excess of 99.9%."

A complete overview of the monitoring results of the WatchMouse Site Availability Index, listing the 100 sites, can be found on http://www.watchmouse.com/SPI/2006/FTSE100.php

British online holiday shops regularly closed for business (2006-05-17)

WatchMouse research shows that 79% of British vacation booking sites are unavailable for more than 1 hour per month

London, May 16, 2006 – More and more people are booking their holidays online, but the typical 24/7 travel shop in the UK is not the norm yet. Airlines sites did a far better job in the same period.

Only two travel sites are always up and running; ebookers.com and thomascook.com. Travelocity.co.uk, virginholidays.co.uk and expedia.co.uk have a good uptime of over 99,9%. But the rest of the companies researched perform below this industry standard rate, with the worst performer - the site traveljungle.co.uk- being unavailable for an equivalent of almost 3 days (69 hours) per month.

These are the conclusions drawn from the WatchMouse Site Performance Index for British holiday websites, created by WatchMouse, a company supplying monitoring services for websites and e-commerce applications worldwide. In order to determine the extent to which the sites achieve a satisfactory uptime, WatchMouse monitored the sites continuously between April 6 and May 9, 2006.

During the same period, WatchMouse monitored the British airlines websites. These perform better generally: 53% was above industry standards and 7 have perfect 100% availability. This shows the airlines realize the need for having a site that is continuously available.

Mark Pors, Chief Technology Officer at WatchMouse: "Nowadays 24 hour availability is achievable, so there is no need for a site being down. For companies who only do business online, and the website is a single source of revenue, downtime means you have no business."

He continues: “We are now entering the period in which traditionally most of the last minute bookings take place. This means the sites can expect even more traffic, with a negative impact on the site availability. Recent research has shown that e-shoppers are impatient, when a site does not download within 30 seconds, 75% of people take their money elsewhere.* So companies may not get a second chance.”

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/en/SPI/2006/travelUK.php and http://www.watchmouse.com/en/SPI/2006/airlinesUK.php

*) research by TelecityRedbus, April 2006

24/7 access to bank account not a reality in the UK (2006-06-21)

WatchMouse research shows that 65% of British internet banking sites are unavailable for more than 1 hour per month

London, June 27, 2006 – The 24/7 internet bank in the UK is not the norm yet. From a test of the main 26 internet banking sites, a mere 3 come out with perfect availability. This perfect, 100% availability is achieved only by Intelligent Finance, Northern Rock, and Ulster Bank. Worst performers are Standard Chartered and Citibank, being unavailable for an equivalent of respectively 2,3 and 2,6 days per month.

These are the conclusions drawn from the WatchMouse Site Performance Index for British internet banking websites, created by WatchMouse, a company supplying monitoring services for websites and e-commerce applications worldwide. In order to determine the extent to which the sites achieve a satisfactory uptime, WatchMouse monitored the sites continuously between May 19 and June 18, 2006.

During the same period, WatchMouse monitored the other main internet banking websites in Europe, and found that in France performance was better then in the UK, with over 40% of banks scoring above 99,9% uptime.

Mark Pors, Chief Technology Officer at WatchMouse: "Nowadays 24 hour availability is achievable, so there is no need for a site being down. Many companies and individuals nowadays rely on internet banking for all of their transactions, which means the internet banking site is the only way to access their funds."

He continues: "It is unacceptable that urgent payments can end up being delayed or stuck, simply because a site is not accessible. Of course these sites get a lot of peak traffic, but this is no excuse; if we look at large online brokers in the US, for example, all achieve an uptime in excess of 99.9%."

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/2006/banksUK.php

(Dutch Only) (2009-12-07)

CDA grote verliezer online - Eén NL staat op nummer één ~ onderzoek WatchMouse toont aan dat niet alle websites van de Nederlandse politieke partijen klaar zijn voor de verkiezingen ~ Utrecht, 18 oktober 2006 – De Nederlandse politiek kan haar online prestaties nog flink verbeteren. Geen enkele website scoort een perfecte 100% bereikbaarheid. Van de websites van de 13 grootste politieke partijen scoren er acht onder de norm wat bereikbaarheid betreft. De Partij voor de Dieren, GroenLinks, Eén NL en D66 doen het wel goed met een bereikbaarheid van boven de 99,9%. De website van het CDA was gedurende de onderzoeksperiode meer dan twee dagen niet bereikbaar en ook de ChristenUnie en de SGP hebben het licht regelmatig op rood staan. Bezoekers van deze sites kregen in totaal meer dan acht uur tijdens de testperiode geen toegang. Dit blijkt uit de tweede WatchMouse Site Performance Index voor Nederlandse politieke partijen. WatchMouse biedt wereldwijd monitoringdiensten aan voor websites en e-commercetoepassingen. Om te controleren of de politieke partijen voldoende uptime scoren in de aanloop naar de verkiezingen, heeft WatchMouse de sites gecontroleerd gedurende de periode van 4 augustus tot 16 oktober 2006. Van downtime is sprake als een site niet bereikbaar is of geen reactie geeft gedurende 8 seconden. Mark Pors, Chief Technology Officer van WatchMouse: "De meeste kiezers, met name jongeren, vertrouwen tegenwoordig op het internet als belangrijkste informatiebron. De bereikbaarheid van de website zou dus een cruciaal onderdeel moeten zijn van de communicatiestrategie van politieke partijen.” “Jan -Peter Balkenende kan, in plaats van zijn virtuele vriendenkring op Hyves uit te breiden, zich beter eens verdiepen in het online visitekaartje van zijn partij”, vervolgt Pors. Een volledige lijst van de WatchMouse Site Performance Index van de 13 politieke partijen is te vinden op http://www.watchmouse.com/nl/SPI/2006/politicsNL.php

WatchMouse releases new Site Performance Monitoring Widget for Apple users (download widget) (2006-10-22)

WatchMouse releases 2.0 widget for dashboard, aimed at Internet site performance monitoring.

NETHERLANDS, 2006-10-23. By means of the widget Apple users can get direct insight into the performance of their own Internet site. The widget can be downloaded for free from the Apple website.

In 2002, WatchMouse (www.watchmouse.com) introduced a new concept for Internet site monitoring. By means of ongoing simulation of Internet visitors the performance of sites and servers is verified. If a site is not responding, an alert message is sent immediately through SMS, pager, Instant Messenger or e-mail. The sites are checked from over twenty monitoring stations worldwide. This is done 24 hours per day, seven days per week. The service is completely web based: customers don't have to install software, everything is 100% self-service, which keeps the costs low.

The three founders of WatchMouse, Niels Eijsbroek, Stan van de Burgt and Mark Pors are enormous Mac-fans with a total of twenty Macs in their possession. The monitoring widget is quite unique: it is a combination of a desktop and a hosted application. When the widgets detects a problem with the site it is checking, it alerts the user with a 'beep', followed by the launch of a web browser, which is directed to a web application on watchmouse.com. There the site is checked from over 20 different locations worldwide.

Worldwide monitoring

The new version (2.0.4) brings continuous performance monitoring, even when the Mac is not connected to the Internet, by connecting the widget to a WatchMouse account (free or paid). In October 2005, WatchMouse released the first version of this widget, which was downloaded over 10.000 times.

WatchMouse has made the widget available free of charge "because we have become addicted to it, ever since we started using the first beta version of the widget", says creative director Niels Eijsbroek. "We give the widget away for free mainly for the fun part. And of course it's also important to bring site performance monitoring to the attention of our fellow Apple-users."

The free WatchMouse site monitoring widget can be downloaded from the Apple website:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/networking_security/watchmousesitemonitor.html

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor their own Internet sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has been monitoring Internet sites and e-commerce applications for companies throughout the world since 2002. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in more than 70 countries. The services supplied by WatchMouse are available in nine languages, and analysis are performed from various locations and over numerous networks, using a world-wide monitoring network.

In 2005, WatchMouse was voted a Deloitte Rising Star in the Netherlands, as part of the Fast 50 awards; the list of the 50 fastest growing technology companies.

Further information can be found at: www.watchmouse.com

Nog steeds ‘werk aan de web-winkel’ in 2006 (2009-12-07)

WatchMouse publiceert voor derde jaar op rij de Site Performance Index voor Nederlandse webwinkels

UTRECHT, 23 november 2006 – De Nederlandse e-shops scoren een hogere uptime in 2006, zo blijkt uit het jaarlijks onderzoek van WatchMouse naar de prestaties van webwinkels in de aanloop naar de feestdagen. In 2005 was de gemiddelde uptime nog 97,69%, dit jaar is het gemiddelde een stuk hoger; 99,43%. Zeker gezien de drukke periode in de aanloop naar Sinterklaas is dit een goed resultaat, maar toch nog steeds onder de industrienorm van 99,9%. Er is dus nog ruimte voor verbetering.

Net als twee jaar geleden in 2004, scoren er wederom zes sites ondanks de grotere drukte, een perfecte uptime. Het betreft de websites van Conrad, Marktplaats, MyLenses, Neckermann, Bol en TakeItNow. De slechts presterende sites dit jaar waren Kijkshop.nl en Mycom.nl met een downtime van meer dan een dag gedurende de meetperiode.

Het hogere gemiddelde komt met name omdat twee negatieve uitschieters van vorig jaar, Rituals.nl en Emmys.nl, het dit jaar een stuk beter doen. Waren deze sites vorig jaar nog respectievelijk meer dan 6 en 7 dagen niet bereikbaar in november, nu scoren ze een uptime van respectievelijk 97,85% en 99,9%.

"Volgens recent onderzoek van Forrester zullen 23% van de mensen dit jaar meer geld online besteden aan inkopen voor de feestdagen dan een jaar geleden. En uit ons onderzoek blijkt dat een aantal partijen zeker effectieve maatregelen heeft genomen om zich hierop voor te bereiden", zegt Mark Pors, CTO van WatchMouse. "Wij zijn blij met deze positieve ontwikkeling. Maar er is zeker nog ruimte voor verbeteringen. Want uiteindelijk behaalt nog steeds de meerderheid van de webwinkels -58%- niet de uptime score van 99,9% die door hosting providers wordt aangehouden als absoluut minimum.”

Vorig jaar bleek de kerstperiode overigens nog drukker dan de periode voor Sinterklaas. Om die reden zal WatchMouse ook in de weken voor kerst blijven monitoren. Vlak voor kerst verwacht WatchMouse met de resultaten te komen van die tweede testperiode.

Het onderzoek liep van 20 oktober t/m 21 november 2006. Van 'downtime' is sprake als een site een foutmelding geeft of de HTML na acht seconden niet ontvangen is, en dit vanuit een tweede meetpunt bevestigd is. Het complete bereikbaarheidsonderzoek is te vinden op: http://www.watchmouse.com/nl/SPI/2006/eshops_NL.php

Over WatchMouse

Bedrijven kunnen eenvoudig de performance van hun websites controleren door gebruik te maken van de monitoringdienst van WatchMouse. Sinds 2002 controleert WatchMouse internet sites en e-commerce toepassingen van bedrijven over de hele wereld. WatchMouse heeft duizenden klanten in meer dan 70 landen. De dienst is beschikbaar in acht talen en de controles worden uitgevoerd vanuit een groot aantal locaties in het wereldwijde WatchMouse monitoring netwerk.

WatchMouse heeft de 'Rising Star' prijs gewonnen in de Deloitte Technology Fast 50 competitie van 2005, de verkiezing van de 50 snelstgroeiende technologiebedrijven in Nederland.

"Want to know the performance of your website?" (2006-11-29)

- WatchMouse launches Site Monitor for PC users –

Netherlands, November 29, 2006 - WatchMouse launches its free WatchMouse Site Monitor for Windows. This application provides PC users insight into the availability of their website(s) at all times. The Site Monitor can be downloaded for free at the WatchMouse website. Installing it only takes a minute.

The Site Monitor checks your company's site or your personal website at fixed intervals (5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes) from your own pc. When an error is found, or after 2 to 5 consecutive errors, you are alerted and the error is verified by all WatchMouse monitoring stations. Also, the availability of the site in the last 72 hours is shown in a performance chart.

The Site Monitor can be combined with a free WatchMouse account. This gives you the following extra benefits:

• The application can show you the monitoring results of all websites included in the account
• The monitoring is not only done from your own PC, but also from more than 20 WatchMouse checkpoints worldwide
• The application shows performance charts for any period in the Site Monitor
• In case of an alert the WatchMouse site is launched for more details
• Monitoring continues even when the PC is without an internet connection

In exchange for these extra benefits WatchMouse asks you to place a small uptime banner on the sites that are monitored.

The WatchMouse Site Monitor for Windows can be downloaded for free at http://www.watchmouse.com/windows/site_monitor.php Installing it only takes a minute.

Ook internetverkeer plat door storm (2009-12-07)

Weergerelateerde sites onbereikbaar voor laatste nieuws over storm

Utrecht, 18 januari 2007 – Naast het Nederlandse verkeer lag ook een groot deel van het Nederlandse internetverkeer stil door de storm die het land teisterde. Mensen die op de sites van het KNMI wilden zien hoe de storm hun omgeving beïnvloedt en wat hen nog te wachten staat, troffen een erg trage site en kregen regelmatig zelfs een foutmelding. Ook het vliegverkeer lijdt op internet onder de storm. De websites van KLM en van Schiphol bleken beiden onbereikbaar.

Het openbaar- en wegvervoer deden het vanmiddag nog goed. Zowel de ANWB als de NS, OVR en VID waren redelijk goed te bereiken. De pagina’s waren overwegend traag maar toonden wel het meest actuele nieuws. In de vroege avondspits kregen deze sites het echter ook zwaar en waren ze met enige regelmaat zelfs onbereikbaar. De site www.crisis.nl kon nadat deze vermeld werd in de media 10-30% van haar bezoekers niet bedienen. Wel had men hier vanaf het begin een voor een eenvoudige, statische site gekozen die snel laadde voor degene die er wel doorheen kwamen.

Dit meldt WatchMouse, het site- en servermonitoringbedrijf uit Utrecht. Door de extreme weeromstandigheden blijkt dat veel sites een massale toestroom van internetters naar hun site niet aankunnen.

"In november 2005 bleek dat bepaalde informatieve sites niet goed voorbereid waren op extreme weeromstandigheden als de hevige sneeuwval van toen en de voorlichtende rol die zij daarbij moeten spelen. Ook nu blijken deze sites de toestroom van ongeruste reizigers niet aan te kunnen”, vertelt Mark Pors, Chief Technology Officer van WatchMouse. “We adviseren deze bedrijven te allen tijde een eenvoudige versie van hun site standby te hebbens staan om in geval van zwaar weer naar over te kunnen schakelen. Als dat op het moment zelf nog moet worden geregeld duurt dit veel te lang. Om de slogan van de overheid maar aan te halen: ‘Denk Vooruit!’ ”.

WatchMouse introduces Site Performance Index (2009-05-14)

new industry gauge offers complete overview of website performance

WatchMouse, the website monitoring company, has launched the WatchMouse Site Performance Index (SPI). The index acts as a gauge for measuring the performance of websites. It gives a complete overview of visitors’ experiences when using a website in terms of both the speed and availability.

WatchMouse measures the SPIs of the major players in 30 different industry sectors including banking, travel, insurance and logistics. The resulting reports are published monthly on www.watchmouse.com/SPI

The SPI measures the waiting times experienced by visitors accessing a site. The longer the loading time or the worse the availability of a web page, the higher the final score and the lower the level of visitor satisfaction. Sites with an SPI of 1,000 or less are performing well whilst those companies that score above 1,500 have work to do.

WatchMouse’s SPI site currently contains reports from 30 different sectors across five countries. Summaries of the reports can be accessed free of charge from the WatchMouse website and full reports can be ordered on the site.

The reports are refreshed every quarter and offer extensive trend analysis, background information and complete score tables with measurement results for the companies monitored in each sector, and by country. Companies can also, for a fee, order benchmark reports which clearly show how their own corporate site is scoring in relation to those of their competitors. In addition, tailor-made reports can be ordered, in which companies can specify their own lists of ‘peers’.

“Good website performance is crucial as recent research by Jupiter Research demonstrates that customers can give up after waiting for just four seconds,” said Mark Pors, chief technology officer at WatchMouse. “We are also seeing a shift taking place whereby, alongside availability, loading speeds are also being included in service level agreements (SLAs).”

“The SPI reports enable companies to find out whether their SLAs are in fact being achieved, and compare this with the website performance of their competitors. In this way, they can easily assess whether there is room for improvement,” he explained.

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.

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/

Websites merendeel Nederlandse banken slecht bereikbaar (2009-05-14)

Europees onderzoek WatchMouse: websites enkele uren tot meerdere dagen uit de lucht

Utrecht, 1 Augustus 2007 – Banken besteden te weinig aandacht aan de bereikbaarheid van hun websites, blijkt uit Europees onderzoek van WatchMouse, het Nederlandse websitemonitoringbedrijf. De Nederlandse banken verschillen onderling veel, maar in vergelijking met andere Europese landen doet Nederland het niet best.

Europees onderzoek WatchMouse: websites enkele uren tot meerdere dagen uit de lucht

Slechts zes van de in totaal 17 gemonitorde Nederlandse sites voldoen aan een bereikbaarheidsscore van 99,9%, wat in de ogen van de onderzoekers goed is. Vergeleken met de andere landen blijkt dat Nederlandse banken geen hoogvliegers zijn wat betreft bereikbaarheid. Van de in totaal 120 onderzochte sites haalde geen enkele bank de hoogst mogelijke score. In Oostenrijk heeft meer dan de helft van de onderzochte bedrijven een goede score. Ook Zweden en Duitsland hebben gemiddeld beter presterende bankensites in de gelederen dan Nederland.

De redenen voor het slecht functioneren van een site lopen erg uiteen maar domain name server (DNS)-problemen spannen de kroon. WatchMouse concludeert hieruit dat het monitoren en duidelijk onderhandelen over deze services vaak vergeten worden. Een mogelijke reden daarvoor is dat deze diensten vaak erbij gedaan worden of worden overgelaten aan de ISP, het hostingbedrijf of de beheerder van het domein.

Voor het onderzoek ontwikkelde WatchMouse de Site Performance Index (SPI), die zowel de beschikbaarheid als de snelheid van een website monitort en waarmee sites kunnen worden vergeleken. De SPI is daarmee een weergave van de gemiddelde wachtijd: hoe hoger de SPI, hoe langer bezoekers gemiddeld moeten wachten op het laden van de site. Een SPI van 1000 of lager wordt als ‘goed’ gezien. Ter vergelijking: Google heeft een SPI van 170, wat door geen enkele andere site gehaald wordt.

In dit onderzoek controleerde Watchmouse iedere 5 minuten 120 banksites vanuit een twintigtal controlepunten verspreid over de wereld.

“Nu banken steeds meer transacties doen via internet is het cruciaal dat de site beschikbaar is voor klanten. Hoewel klanten vrij loyaal aan hun bank zijn, kan het nooit de bedoeling zijn dat je test waar hun irritatiegrens ligt door gewoon uren of dagen niet bereikbaar te zijn. Vorig jaar hebben we eenzelfde vergelijkende test gedaan en ook toen presteerden Nederlandse banken matig. Er is dus nog steeds meer dan genoeg ruimte voor verbetering”, vertelt Mark Pors, Chief Technology Officer van WatchMouse.

Kijk voor meer informatie over WatchMouse en de Site Performance Index op http://www.watchmouse.com

WatchMouse onderzoekt hosting in Nederland. (2009-12-07)

Prestaties Nederlandse hosting partijen lopen sterk uiteen

Utrecht, 12 september 2007 – In Nederland zijn veel bedrijven ontevreden over de partij waar ze hun website hebben ondergebracht. Vooral in het MKB wordt vaak gezworven van provider naar provider, en het is vaak onduidelijk waar men op moet letten bij het kiezen van een goede provider. WatchMouse heeft daarom in de afgelopen vier weken een onderzoek naar de Site Performance Index (SPI) uitgevoerd onder 127 hostingpartijen en concludeert dat de de prestaties inderdaad erg uiteen lopen. Een aantal bedrijven hadden een goed resultaat van minder dan 400, maar er zaten ook uitschieters van meer dan 1000 bij.

De WatchMouse Site Performance Index (SPI) gaat verder dan alleen het bepalen van de "uptime" en combineert zowel gegevens over de snelheid als de beschikbaarheid van een website. Hierdoor geeft de SPI een goede voorstelling van de gemiddelde wachttijd voor de bezoeker van een site: hoe hoger de SPI, hoe langer bezoekers gemiddeld moeten wachten tot de site geladen is. Ter vergelijking: Google.nl heeft in dezelfde meetperiode een SPI van 188, dus ruim lager dan de beste host provider, waar 269 werd geregistreerd. Er waren ook uitschieters van boven de 1000, wat aangeeft dat er onnodig lange wachttijden zijn.

WatchMouse gebruikte de volgende meetmethode: Van elke provider werden de afgelopen vier weken elke 15 minuten de eerste 10.000 tekens van de homepage geladen, zonder plaatjes, vanaf een willekeurig gekozen controlestation uit het WatchMouse netwerk (inmiddels 24 stations). Er is ervoor gekozen alleen naar de eerste 10.000 tekens te kijken om sites met veel content niet te benadelen. Overigens blijven zeer lichte sites hierbij in het voordeel. Als deze eerste 10.000 tekens niet binnen 4 seconden werden geladen, en dit door een tweede meetstation bevestigd kon worden, werd dit als een fout aangemerkt, en een penalty (in rood in de SPI grafiek) gerekend.

In het Site Performance onderzoek zijn alle hostingbedrijven betrokken die begin augustus genoemd werden op de dedicated hosting pagina van Startpagina.nl.

Mark Pors, Chief Technology Officer van WatchMouse, merkt op: "30% van de fouten zijn serverfouten, en duiden op overbelaste en slecht geconfigureerde servers. Dat is iets dat hosting providers bij uitstek onder de knie zouden moeten hebben". Ook noemt hij dat "fouten over de dag verspreid zijn, en dus niet in (nachtelijke) maintenance slots voorkomen".

Over de resultaten zegt Pors: "Mensen die een hosting bedrijf zoeken voor hun website, zullen niet snel geneigd zijn om het beheer van hun site onder te brengen bij een hosting bedrijf waarvan de site slecht bereikbaar is. Optimale performance is dus met name voor deze bedrijven cruciaal."

Een samenvatting van het onderzoek is beschikbaar in grafiekvorm. Het volledige rapport van het onderzoek kan worden aangeschaft op de site van WatchMouse (www.watchmouse.com ).

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

In times of crisis, the sites of Australia's Emergency Services aren't available (2008-03-04)

March 4 2008 – With Bushfires in WA’s Goldfields region & floods in Mackay, Australia’s emergency services are needed more than ever but many are unreachable.

WatchMouse, a leader in website performance monitoring, tested the sites belonging to Australian Emergency Services organisations for errors, availability & performance. Only one of the 26 monitored sites was found to have ‘good’ uptime while seven sites had ‘serious user issues’. Another disturbing finding was that during the Mackay floods on the 15th of February, a time when residents needed information and support from their emergency services, Queensland’s Ambulance, Fire (Rural & Metropolitan) and Police sites all encountered serious errors and were unavailable for considerable periods of time.

After a month’s monitoring, WatchMouse combined the errors, speed (load time) and availability measurements of a site to calculate its Site Performance Index (SPI). An SPI of ≤1000 represents a ‘well performing’ site, 1001 - 1999 is regarded as an ‘acceptable’ SPI while an SPI score of above ≥2000 represents a site with ‘serious user issues’. Of the 26 sites monitored sites, those with the worst SPI included that of the Australian Federal Police with an SPI 2,990, the Victorian Metropolitan Fire Brigade site with an SPI 2,756 and the Victorian Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority site which scored SPI 2,604. All of these poor SPI rankings were due to very slow load times.

In line with industry standards, WatchMouse ranks a site’s uptime as ‘good’ if it is ≥99.9%, ‘OK’ between 99.89% - 99.01% and ‘poor’ if it is ≤99%. Alarmingly, only the site of ACT Rural Fire Brigade had a ‘good’ uptime result. The majority of sites ranked as ‘OK’ while three Emergency Services’ sites ranked as ‘poor’. The site with the lowest uptime was that of WA’s Ambulance Service with 92.44%.

WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors said “99% uptime sounds great but when you actually calculate it, this means 80+ hours of downtime a year. That’s one working day per month! The Emergency Services phone lines could not be down for a day each month so why is it acceptable for the site?. Mackay represents a small proportion (approx. 4%) of Queensland's total population but given that the sites of Queensland Emergency Services struggled during the Mackay floods, we can only imagine what will happen to those sites in the case of a disaster on a greater scale, when 100s of thousands of people attempt to visit."

To view the results of the monitoring, including an SPI graph and information about the WatchMouse monitoring methodology visit: www.watchmouse.com/SPI/2008/performance_australian_emergency_sites.php

WatchMouse Urges AdWords Advertisers To Act Swiftly To Avoid Costly Mistakes (2008-04-08)

Utrecht, The Netherlands, 12th March 2008, Research has long confirmed that slow websites drive away potential customers. As Google announces changes to the way they score their immensely popular AdWords, it also appears that sites with slow landing pages create issues for online advertising.

Google will soon incorporate landing page load time (the amount of time it takes for a page to show after a user clicks an ad) as an additional factor in determining a site’s ‘quality score.’ Google says they are making this change as “users value ads that bring them to the information they want as efficiently as possible.” Experts warn that failure to demonstrate a fast load time will result in your keywords getting a lower quality score and higher minimum bids.

A post by Google on the WebMasterWorld blog indicates that the new scoring method will be announced shortly, "now that the (landing) page load time initiative has been mentioned in this and other public forums, the Inside AdWords blog post is likely to be posted sooner rather than later - perhaps as early as this week".

The impact of the new AdWords scoring method will be financial. WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors, advised "when Google introduces the new scoring method, AdWords with slow landing pages will cost more. Slow landing pages will be listed below their faster competitors, thus increasing the cost-per-click (CPC) to get a higher position, or substantially lowering the number of customers visiting the site, as studies show that the top few AdWords obtain the vast majority of the traffic volume". Pors suggested “businesses should do everything possible to prevent a low Google 'quality score' and do so as soon as possible, as the AdWord system will only re-evaluate landing pages on a monthly basis”.

Measuring web site performance, however, is not a straightforward exercise, as many factors influence it. Pors urges Google AdWords customers to “avoid costly mistakes and have independent website monitoring set up to continuously measure load time from different locations worldwide. Once a business has accurate statistics, it can make necessary changes well in advance of Google’s new ’Quality Score’ launch date, and keep a close eye on it after that”.

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 leader 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.

WatchMouse research finds poor site performance for ASX listed companies - Telstra scores the worst (2008-03-19)

Utrecht, the Netherlands, 19 March 2008 - WatchMouse, a leader in website performance monitoring, tested the sites belonging to Australian’s largest listed companies for errors, availability and performance. Of the 51 monitored sites, 63% were found to have ‘good’ or ‘OK’ uptime while an alarming 37% ranked as ‘poor’. The most concerning inclusion in the list of ‘poor’ performers is that of Australia’s leading telco provider, Telstra with 98.1% uptime. Newscrest and Alumina sites recorded the worst uptime with 89.7% and 88.5% respectively which equates to both sites being unavailable for more than 3 days during the month of monitoring.

In line with industry standards, WatchMouse ranks a site’s uptime as ‘good’ if it is ≥99.9%, ‘OK’ if it is between 99.89% - 99.01% and ‘poor’ if it is ≤99%. WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors points out that “99% uptime sounds great but when you calculate it, this means 80+ hours of downtime a year. That’s one working day per month.”

WatchMouse monitored the sites between 11 February - 13 March 2008 during which one of WatchMouse’s monitoring stations attempted to access the homepage of each site every five minutes. Sites were expected to download within 4 seconds without any errors. Combining the errors, speed (load time) and availability measurements, WatchMouse calculated a Site Availability Index (SPI) for each of the sites. An SPI of ≤1,000 represents a ‘well performing’ site, 1,001 - 1,999 is regarded as ‘acceptable’, while a score of above 2,000 represents a site with ‘serious user issues’.

Of the 51 monitored sites, a whooping 26 scored an SPI of above 2,000; the vast majority as a result of very long load times. Mark Pors said, “We’re very surprised by these results. We’d expect Australia’s largest listed companies to place a great deal of importance on having a well performing site; as a company’s site is a tool to providing investors with information and to project a professional corporate image. Instead we’ve found 50% had serious user issues. WatchMouse has been monitoring sites belonging to companies listed on some of the world’s largest stock exchanges for many years and never before found such a poor overall result.”

WatchMouse expected a very large telco like Telstra to have the knowledge, facilities and desire to build a fast and reliable site. Shockingly, Telstra’s main site www.telstra.com.au was found to have the worst SPI with a score of 8,018. Other sites with very poor SPIs belong to AGL Energy with 5,129 and Westfarmer with 4,207.

A complete overview of the ASX monitoring results can be found at: http://www.watchmouse.com/SPI/2008/performance_ASX50_sites.php

WatchMouse finds some poor site performance for DAX30 listed companies - Deutsche Telekom’s site the worst (2008-03-19)

Utrecht, the Netherlands, 18 March 2008 - WatchMouse, a leader in website performance monitoring, tested the sites belonging to German’s largest listed companies for errors, availability and performance. Of the 30 monitored sites, 40% were found to have ‘good’ uptime, 43% ranked as ‘OK’ while the remaining 17% ranked as ‘poor’. The most concerning inclusion in the list of ‘poor’ performers is that of Germany’s leading telco provider, Deutsche Telekom with only 97.89% uptime. Thyssenkrupp’s site recorded the worst uptime score of 71.87% meaning the site was unreachable for more than 8 days during the month of monitoring.

In line with industry standards, WatchMouse ranks a site’s uptime as ‘good’ if it is ≥99.9%, ‘OK’ if it between 99.89% - 99.01% & ‘poor’ if it is ≤99%. WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors points out that “99% uptime sounds great but when you calculate it, this means 80+ hours of downtime a year. That’s one working day per month.”

WatchMouse monitored the sites between 11 February - 13 March 2008 during which one of WatchMouse’s monitoring stations tried to access the homepage of the sites every five minutes. Sites were expected to download within 4 seconds without any errors. Combining the errors, speed (load time) and availability measurements, WatchMouse calculated a Site Availability Index (SPI) for each of the sites. An SPI of ≤1,000 represents a ‘well performing’ site, 1,001 - 1,999 is regarded as ‘acceptable’, while a score of above 2,000 represents a site with ‘serious user issues’.

Three of the 30 sites were found to have ‘serious user issues’ with SPI scores of above 2,000. These sites belong to Allianz which scored an SPI of 2,336, Hypo Real Estate Holding which scored an SPI of 2,647 and Deutsche Telekom which scored the worst SPI of 3,248. Deutsche Telekom and Hypo Real Estate Holding’s sites both had very long load times and many errors.

Mark Pors said, “We’re very surprised by these results. We’d expect a large telco like Deutsche Telekom to have the knowledge, facilities and desire to build a fast and reliable site, instead we found the Deutsche Telekom site operating well below industry standards.”

A complete overview of the DAX30 monitoring results can be found at: http://www.watchmouse.com/SPI/2008/performance_DAX30_sites.php

WatchMouse and Badboy Software announce partnership (2008-04-03)

Partnership brings easy website transaction monitoring

WatchMouse is pleased to announce a partnership with Australia's Badboy Software. The partnership combines the immensely popular Badboy scripting tool with WatchMouse's market leading website performance monitoring, enabling customers to record complex transaction scripts and run them using a global infrastructure.

Owner and founder of Badboy Software, Simon Sadedin says, "With Badboy Software's in-depth experience in functional testing and WatchMouse's extensive infrastructure, technology and know-how for running enterprise grade monitoring solutions, we have a unique opportunity for collaboration."

The powerful Badboy scripting tool enables customers to professionally record all the actions involved in a web transaction. Designed to aid in the testing and development of complex dynamic applications, the Badboy tool contains dozens of features including a simple yet comprehensive capture/replay interface, load testing support, detailed reports, graphs etc.

WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors explains, "Having integrated with Badboy, our customers can now upload their Badboy scripts directly into their WatchMouse console. Scripts can then be automatically and periodically run from WatchMouse's global infrastructure of 25+ checkpoints. This new functionality enables our customers to monitor their web applications 24/7 and know how their site behaves when customers access it from locations all around the world."

As a global leader in website performance monitoring, WatchMouse provides many of the world's largest companies with independent verifications of their website performance. With immediate results, automated alerting, simple set up and flexible subscriptions, WatchMouse offers the features, control and quality of service essential for today's online business.

The partnership between WatchMouse and Badboy Software provides customers with a market first: global, easy, powerful, web application testing.

To find out more about this new functionality and sign up for a free trial visit: http://www.watchmouse.com/scripting.php

Mark Pors
CTO
WatchMouse
http://www.watchmouse.com/

WatchMouse Finds Poor Site Performance for UK gambling site - Tote’s site the worst (2008-04-09)

Utrecht, the Netherlands, 9 April 2008 - WatchMouse, a leader in website performance monitoring, tested the sites belonging to the UK’s online gambling companies for errors, availability and performance. The testing was conducted on the Grand National race day and for the 10 days prior. WatchMouse anticipated that the sites of gambling companies would perform well to facilitate their customers placing bets on this important event. Surprisingly, WatchMouse found that Tote’s site had serious user issues with a Site Performance Index (SPI) of 2,854 while the sites belonging to Stan James, William Hill and Blue Square only scraped acceptable SPI scores. Additionally, the sites of SkyBet and Jennings Bet were found to have uptime scores well below accepted industry standards.   

Monitoring was conducted from 26 March - 5 April 2008. During, this period one of WatchMouse’s monitoring stations tried to access the homepage of the sites every five minutes. Sites were expected to download within 4 seconds without any errors. Combining the errors, speed (load time) and availability measurements, WatchMouse calculated a Site Availability Index (SPI) for each of the sites. An SPI of less than 1,000 represents a ‘well performing’ site, 1,001 - 1,999 is regarded as ‘acceptable’, while a score of above 2,000 represents a site with ‘serious user issues’.

By a significant margin, the site of Jennings Bet was found to have the highest number of errors but when combined with a fast load time, resulted in an acceptable overall SPI score of 1,279 and recorded no errors on race day. By contrast, Tote’s site scored a dismal SPI of 2,854 due largely to very long load times. Slow load times were also the main cause of Stan James, William Hill and Blue Square sites’ scoring barely acceptable SPIs of 1,792, 1,655 and 1,615 respectively.

WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors, said, “As one in three British adults bets on the Grand National*, we anticipated that the UK’s gambling companies would strive to provide their customers with a fast, error free sites. I am therefore surprised that in the lead up to this important betting event, our testing found the sites of some major gambling companies to be operating well below accepted industry standards.”

In line with industry standards, WatchMouse ranks a site’s uptime as good if it is greater than 99.9%, OK if it between 99.89% - 99.01% and poor if it is less than 99%. Mark Pors points out that “99% uptime sounds great but when you calculate it, this means 80+ hours of downtime a year. That’s one working day per month.”

The sites ranking as poor are those belonging to SkyBet and Jennings Bet who scored 98.52% and 95.57% respectively; meaning the Jennings Bet site was unreachable for more than 32 hours, during the 10 days of monitoring.

A complete overview of the SPI monitoring results can be found at: http://www.watchmouse.com/SPI/2008/performance_UKbetting_sites.php

*BBC News, 4 April 2008

WatchMouse finds poor site performance for many CAC40 listed companies - Surprisingly, Air France-KLM and France Telecom amongst the worst (2008-05-23)

Utrecht, the Netherlands, 20 May 2008 - WatchMouse, a leader in website performance monitoring, tested the sites belonging to France’s CAC40 listed companies for errors, availability and performance. Five of the 40 monitored sites were found to have ‘serious user issues’. These sites belong to L’Oreal, France Telecom, Air France-KLM, Lagardere and Danone. Air France-KLM, Lagardere and Danone's sites were also found to have an uptime score, well below the accepted industry standards.

During the two month monitoring period, one of WatchMouse’s monitoring stations tried to access the homepage of the sites every five minutes. Sites were expected to download within 4 seconds without any errors. Combining the errors, speed (load time) and availability measurements, WatchMouse calculated a Site Performance Index 'SPI' for each of the sites. An SPI of ≤1,000 represents a ‘well performing’ site, 1,001 - 1,999 is regarded as ‘acceptable’, while a score of above 2,000 represents a site with ‘serious user issues’.

The poor SPI results of L’Oreal and France Telecom’s sites were due to very long load times while Air France-KLM, Lagardere and Donone’s sites were all found to have a significant number of errors, in-addition to very long load times.

WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors said, “As a telecommunications company, we’d expect France Telecom to have all the knowledge, facilities and desire to build a fast and reliable site. We’re therefore very surprised that this research found the France Telecom site operating well below industry standards.”

WatchMouse also reports on site uptime. In line with industry standards, WatchMouse ranks a site’s uptime as ‘good’ if it is ≥99.9%, ‘OK’ if it between 99.89% - 99.01% and ‘poor’ if it is ≤99%. Mark Pors points out that “99% uptime sounds great but when you calculate it, this means 80+ hours of downtime a year. That’s one working day per month.”

Of the CAC40 monitored sites, those with poor uptime results belong to: Air Liquide, Carrefour, Schneider Electric, Veolia Environnement, Danone, Air France-KLM and Lagardere. Lagardere’s site scored 89% uptime meaning it was unavailable for more than three days during the period of monitoring.

A complete overview of the CAC40 monitoring results can be found at: http://www.watchmouse.com/SPI/2008/performance_CAC40_sites.php

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor the performance of their web sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in over 70 countries and checks from 25+ locations and networks worldwide (see www.watchmouse.com).

Contact: Mark Pors, mark@watchmouse.com +31302522400

WatchMouse finds poor site performance for some SMI listed companies - Richemont & Zurich Financial found to be the worst. (2008-05-23)

Utrecht, the Netherlands, 20 May 2008 - WatchMouse, a leader in website performance monitoring, tested the sites belonging to Switzerland’s SMI listed companies for errors, availability and performance. Three of the 20 monitored sites were found to have ‘serious user issues’. These sites belong to Baloise, Zurich Financial and Richemont. Zurich Financial and Richemont’s sites were also amongst six SMI sites found to have an uptime well below the accepted industry standard.

During the two month monitoring period, one of WatchMouse’s monitoring stations tried to access the homepage of the sites every five minutes. Sites were expected to download within 4 seconds without any errors. Combining the errors, speed (load time) and availability measurements, WatchMouse calculated a Site Availability Index (SPI) for each of the sites. An SPI of ≤1,000 represents a ‘well performing’ site, 1,001 - 1,999 is regarded as ‘acceptable’, while a score of above 2,000 represents a site with ‘serious user issues’.

The poor SPI results of Richemont and Baloise sites were largely due to very long load times while the SPI result of Zurich Financial’s site was due to both long load times and a considerable number of errors.

Mark Pors said, “I would have anticipated Switzerland’s largest luxury goods and financial services companies to strive to provide their customers and investors with a fast, error free sites as an important channel through which they promote their products, services and build brand awareness. I am therefore, very surprised that this research found these major companies’ sites operating well below accepted industry standards.”

WatchMouse also reports on site uptime. In line with industry standards, WatchMouse ranks a site’s uptime as ‘good’ if it is ≥99.9%, ‘OK’ if it between 99.89% - 99.01% and ‘poor’ if it is ≤99%. WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors points out that “99% uptime sounds great but when you calculate it, this means 80+ hours of downtime a year. That’s one working day per month.”

Of the 20 monitored SIM sites, those with the worst uptime results belong to: Nobel Biocare, Richemont, Zurich Financial, Nestle, Adecco and Synthes. Synthes’s site scored 95% meaning it was unavailable for more than a day during monitoring.

A complete overview of the SMI monitoring results can be found at: http://www.watchmouse.com/SPI/2008/performance_SMI_sites.php

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor the performance of their web sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in over 70 countries and checks from 25+ locations and networks worldwide (see www.watchmouse.com).

Contact: Mark Pors, mark@watchmouse.com +31302522400

Ranking of EURO 2008 nations' sports sites - France the online winner! (2008-06-23)

Utrecht, the Netherlands, 19th June 2008 - WatchMouse, a leader in website performance monitoring, monitored the most popular sports sites, belonging to each of the Euro 2008 nations. Combining the errors, speed (load time) and availability measurements, WatchMouse calculated a Site Performance Index (SPI) for each of the sites, to reveal that the nations with the best sports sites are France, Spain and the Netherlands. Sports enthusiasts in Turkey may be disappointed by confirmation that their nation’s favorite sports site ranks as the worst, largely due to long load times.

WatchMouse’s monitoring stations tried to access the homepage of each nations' favorite sports site every five minutes. With no errors, 100% availability and a load time of less than 4 seconds, France's www.lequipe.fr ranked as the best sports site with an enviably low SPI of 203, while Spain's www.marca.com narrowly took second place over the Dutch www.vi.nl. Of the 16 monitored sites, only Turkey’s spor.ekolay.net and Austrian’s www.krone.at/sport were found to have 'serious user issues'.

WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors said, “We're very pleased to find that many of the Euro 2008 nations have sports sites that function really well. We hope that as we continue monitoring, we'll see Turkey's national sports site improve as dramatically as their game did on Sunday!"

    Euro 2008 Sport Sites League Table:

    Rank              Country Site                              SPI

    1. France          http://www.lequipe.fr                    203

    2. Spain           http://www.marca.com                     478

    3. Netherlands     http://www.vi.nl                         488

    4. Croatia         http://sportskenovosti.hr                653

    5. Germany         http://www.sportbild.de                  657

    6. Italy           http://www.gazzetta.it                   767

    7. Switzerland     http://www.blink.ch/sport                785

    8. Czech Republic  http://www.sportovninoviny.cz            838

    9. Greece          http://www.sport24.gr                   1000

    10. Sweden         http://www.aftonbladet.se/sportbladet   1051

    11. Poland         http://www.sport.pl                     1169

    12. Russia         http://www.russiatoday.ru/sports        1275

    13. Portugal       http://www.abola.pt                     1214

    14. Romania        http://www.gsp.ro                       1486

    15. Austria        http://www.krone.at/sport               2041

    16. Turkey         http://spor.ekolay.net                  2796

Since monitoring started on 11 June 2008, one of WatchMouse’s monitoring stations has tried to access the homepage of each of the 16 sites, every five minutes. Sites are expected to download within 4 seconds without any errors. Combining the errors, speed (load time) and availability measurements, WatchMouse calculated a SPI for each of the sites. An SPI of less than 1,000 represents a ‘well performing’ site, 1,001 - 1,999 is regarded as ‘acceptable’, while a score of above 2,000 represents a site with ‘serious user issues’.

A complete overview of the Euro2008 monitoring results can be found at: http://www.watchmouse.com/SPI/2008/performance_EURO08_sites.php

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor the performance of their web sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in over 70 countries and checks from 25+ locations and networks worldwide (see www.watchmouse.com/)

Contact: Mark Pors, mark@watchmouse.com, +31302522400

WatchMouse Launches API-status.com (2010-01-20)

New Site Monitors and Measures Uptime of 26 Popular API and Cloud Services Websites; Report Reveals Amazon, Google and Yahoo Among the Best and Vimeo, foursquare and Yammer Among the Worst Performers

WatchMouse, a global industry leader in self-service website and application performance monitoring, announced the launch today of API-status.com, a new dedicated website for monitoring and measuring the real time availability and performance of the public APIs of 26 heavily trafficked, popular “cloud computing” mega web services including: Google Search, Google Maps, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, SalesForce, YouTube, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, Wikipedia and others.

API-status.com does a call and check for a valid result on each of the APIs, and if the result is wrong or is received after four seconds, it is noted as an error and unavailable. The percentage of availability or uptime is based on the number of errors reported; details on API-status.com include a seven-day history along with a 24-hour glance and performance indication by country.

"Nearly all websites nowadays include information from outside sources such as maps or social media feeds. It impacts millions of websites worldwide if these services and systems are slow or down and can invoke a global domino effect of breakages and slowness," states Mark Pors, CTO and co-founder of WatchMouse. "The four-second limit on the response time may seem strict, but it is actually a long time, especially when the (mash-up) sites need to do multiple API calls to present a complete page to the visitor."

According to a recent report produced by Forrester Research and Akamai, two seconds was revealed as the new threshold of acceptability for e-commerce web page response times.

30-Day Report Card and Methodology

WatchMouse monitored the availability of 26 API/cloud web services during the period of December 16, 2009 to January 16, 2010. The results found that Yammer API had the lowest availability with 96.06 percent uptime and Amazon, Google Maps, Google Search, last.fm, and Yahoo Maps with the highest availability with 100 percent uptime. In accordance with industry standards, availability of greater than or equal to 99.9 percent is regarded as "good" while anything below 99 percent is regarded as "poor" site uptime. The methodology for testing the sites includes one simple API call and check for a valid result. This typically means an authentication action for most APIs, including a login, followed by a search or listing action, plus a check of the expected result action. The expected result can immediately return as an error or if the expected result action is reported after four seconds, it is also logged as an error. These errors are used to create the percentage of availability or uptime for each of the sites. Each site is checked in real time using the WatchMouse Public Status Pages tool, which can be used to measure and report the availability of any public website. Companies use the tool, which is hosted on the Amazon platform to inform customers and report publicly on the status of their services.

Click here to read the full report of all 26 website services uptime or visit www.API-status.com for real time status and statistical data on each website.

About APIs

An application programming interface (API) is a set of data structures, protocols, routines and tools for accessing a web-based software application. The practice of publishing APIs allows web communities to create an open architecture for sharing content and data between communities and applications. Content that is created in one place can then be dynamically retreived, posted and/or updated in multiple locations on the Web.

About WatchMouse

Founded in 2002, WatchMouse is a global industry leader in self-service website and application performance monitoring. WatchMouse product tests the behavior and availability of websites, services and applications utilizing an infrastructure that includes 42 worldwide remote monitoring stations in 26 countries. Advanced remote monitoring helps eliminate website downtime, allows issues to be identified and resolved quickly and guarantees peace of mind that your website has been thoroughly and externally tested from the user’s perspective. WatchMouse’s web-based products are easily deployed and offer many features including: extensive reporting tools, root cause analysis, automated email and text/SMS alerts. WatchMouse supports Philips, ING, VeriSign and other leading global companies who depend on WatchMouse to provide independent confirmation of both in-house and suppliers’ website performance. WatchMouse is a privately held company headquartered in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Learn more at http://www.watchmouse.com.

Online shops, speed and downtime, getting the facts. (2009-12-07)

These days your website plays an important role in informing potential customers, converting them into customers who want to do business with you, and possibly also conducting the transactions with these customers. In other words: Your business relies ever more on the digital economy, and increasingly on the transactional part of it, the online shop.

These online shops should obviously provide satisfactory performance. Here, both the speed at which they serve pages and their uptime are important. If potential customers cannot reach the online shop, or the online shop is too slow, they are less likely to do business with you now, and in the future. Studies have revealed that half of the people who experience downtime on a website go to its competitor. A majority of online shoppers say performance and uptime influences their choice of online shop.

The amount of revenue that is lost when your website or online shop does not behave properly is hard to quantify. If your website is slow your customers may select a distribution channel that is more costly for you, or they may go to your competitor. Even worse, they may complain about your company to other potential customers. All of this boils down to lost revenue.

A good website is up for at least 99.9% of the time, even though this still represents more than 8 hours in a full year. In a recent survey we found that many websites do not even achieve 99% availability, which corresponds to more than 3 days of downtime a year. As regards speed, if a web page does not load in less than 4 seconds, people start to leave the site, sometimes forever.

How do you make your online shop an efficient experience for your customers? The site must be designed with a strong focus on the customer task. The technology must be no more complex than is relevant. People get annoyed by slow loading Flash intros and complex and slow Flash-based navigation. Take a look at the Google home page; it is one of the fastest websites in the world. On the other hand, you can still use a video clip of a product, if that is relevant to the customer at a particular point in the transaction. You can also use advanced Web 2.0 technology if it makes the user interface more resilient and user-friendly. To experience this, look at Google maps using a dial-up internet connection. It is a really complex user interface, but everything possible has been done to create a positive user experience.

Technology is also important; make sure that you have good service level agreements with all your technology providers. You also want to stress test the site, to see what happens if a lot of people start using it simultaneously. Finally, you should independently monitor the site. When it is time to talk to your hosting company, IT department or website maintainer, it is very helpful to have hard data that reports on the speed and uptime of your online shop.

Peter van Eijk

dr Peter van Eijk is an independent management consultant associated with WatchMouse, the site monitoring experts www.watchmouse.com. He is experienced in setup, management and audits of digital infrastructures. His blog is "Peter's Griddle".

Gumblar Malware Exploit Circulating (2009-05-19)

US-CERT is aware of public reports of a malware exploit circulating. This is a drive-by-download exploit with multiple stages and is being referred to as Gumblar. The first stage of this exploit attempts to compromise legitimate websites by injecting malicious code into them. Reports indicate that these website infections occur primarily through stolen FTP credentials but may also be compromised through poor configuration settings, vulnerable web applications, etc.  The second stage of this exploit occurs when users visit a website compromised by Gumblar. Users who visit these compromised websites and have not applied updates for known PDF and Flash Player vulnerabilities may become infected with malware. This malware may be used by attackers to monitor network traffic and obtain sensitive information, including FTP and login credentials, that can be used to conduct further exploits. Additionally, this malware may also redirect Google search results for the infected user.

US-CERT encourages users and administrators to apply software updates in a timely manner and use up-to-date antivirus software to help mitigate the risks.

US-CERT will provide additional information as it becomes available.

Monitor your website with WatchMouse (2010-01-13)

Dashboard widget WatchMouse Site Monitor checks up on the website of your choice every 1, 5, 15, 30, or 60 minutes to keep track of its uptime. But wait, there's more...