“We don’t need external service to monitor our sites. We have people on staff to take care of this.”

Many people think like this. Many people, who make important decisions in your company, might think like this. They are both right and wrong. They are right about 99% of the time and we are wrong about 1% of the time. Then again, that 1% percent seems to matter to business owners, as we have come to understand.

Apparently, the problems in Egypt have escalated to the point of online censorship now. Various sources report that Twitter and Facebook have been blocked in order to prevent videos, photos and other information about the protest from becoming public.

Twitter officially confirmed the block yesterday. Today Facebook is also consistently reported to be blocked.

Often the only protection we have online are our passwords. Since passwords are used everywhere - from online banking to common blogs - they are an integral part from of our online presence. Private information is successfully becoming the most valuable resources to come by, so a lot of people are getting more and more paranoid about their privacy.

Each individual spending at least a couple of hours a week online has at least a handful of passwords to remember. It is, however, surprising how most people are still quite negligent when it comes to creating a good password. You will be surprised how people fall for cliches. Well, after all, this is what makes a cliche what it is - a lot of people backing it up.

We are all obsessed with speed. Just today the elevator in my building got me thinking how often we get nervous with the slightest changes in our every day routines.

It usually takes the elevator around 12-15 seconds to get me up to the 4th floor. All of a sudden, the elevator door began malfunctioning, and as a result it now takes me 15 seconds to get to the 4th floor, and another 5 for the door to open. After a couple of days I began to think that the stairs are not such a bad option. Now, imagine that this is your website. People are used to getting the information they need when they need it. When your site gets slower and it takes 10-20 second for a page to load, people tend to get nervous and find an alternative route to get what they want.

When are you performing your next website maintenance? It is night time, yes? Well, let us give you a few pointers on how to do it more smoothly.

Any intentional website downtime requires that you consider 4 main parties - your partners, your current and prospective users, and the search engines. Luckily, the tips below cater to all three.