Web servers are vital to make sure that your website is up and running. Yet sometimes there can be hiccups in service and the response time of your web server can change drastically. Slow server response time can make the difference between a reliable website that anyone can access and a website that drives users away, perhaps to your competition.

Here’s a brief example - just recently domain and hosting provider GoDaddy experienced downtime with their servers which resulted in thousands of websites either being down or responding slowly (or even just hanging, never loading the page). As a result GoDaddy had to go through a big PR mess to get everything fixed. They also had to deal with a throng of angry business owners who rely on their servers to make a living.

Our friends from UKHost4U are in a playful mood, and ask you to join them on their Facebook page! To enter the competition you only need to like the page and wait until Oct 15^th to see if you are the winner. It’s that simple. Oh, we forgot the prize – it’s Google Nexus 7 tablet.

We do website monitoring the way athletes do their thing – with passion! When they hear “challenge”, they understand hard athletic work and dedication to get to the top, when we hear “challenge”, though – we understand website performance, optimization, graphs, stats, you get the point.

What we did for our own Olympics season is simple - chose the sites, set the targets, set the metrics and then just waited. Our goal was to see how the leading news websites would handle the huge traffic increase, and, to be fair, most of them did quite well.

Today, WordPress is probably the most popular blogging platform. Updates roll-out frequently, undergoing constant development. With the majority of bloggers making WordPress their CMS of choice, one cannot help but wonder how safe it is?

Well, it is in fact pretty safe. Not that there are no security issues and exploits every now and then - there are. Fixes are usually available before code oversights become known to the masses. Due to its popularity many try to exploit WordPress, for one reason or another. Updating your installation up to the latest version is one way to avoid most common problems, but this is really the bare minimum you need to cover.

In almost every industry, customers expect to learn most information about a company from their web site. Consumers increasingly use a company’s site to place purchases, pay bills, and seek customer support.

Smart leaders of companies also utilize their website to track current and potential customers and learn valuable information about them. With catalogues and long sales pitches over the phone on the decline, and cloud computing very much already here, it’s important that your online presence is solid.