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.

If you are a part of the travel industry, you probably don’t get much from your summer vacation and are in the office right now, planning someone else’s vacation. Or maybe not exactly, but my guess is you still care how that vacation planning is going for the big guys. Luckily for you, this year we monitored the most popular travel websites again and are here to provide you with the results.

We have monitored 12 websites for 5 weeks from 4 different global locations. The monitoring process covers not only the website performance, but a typical complete web transaction – going to the Home page, choosing destination, browsing the search results, and selecting hotel offer. The KPI metrics for the reports are Uptime and Response Time, which are basically the default user experience metrics.

Cloud computing is a development that could change the computer industry. Technology heavyweights such as Microsoft, IBM and Google have already invested millions of dollars into its research, reflecting a growing belief that it’s a method of computing that’ll continue to grow in prevalence, changing, for the better, the way we use computers in our personal and business lives.

If you’re a start-up or small business owner and not too tech savvy, you may wonder what cloud computing actually involves. Essentially, it involves a significant shift in IT system workload with remote, rather than local computers, running everything from e-mail to word processing. You’d simply log into a web-based service that would host all the relevant programs for your business and then go from there. If you’re a user of Hotmail, it would be similar to logging into that.