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.

There are many different components by which you can measure the performance of your website - uptime, availability, speed, ease of use, etc. One of these components, which is by far the third most important after only availability and uptime, is the response time. In essence, response time is the total amount of time needed to download all the components of the page that the user is visiting.

You can use the free web page test tool to check out the response time of a random page below:

In our previous post, we discussed the email round-trip monitoring level as the best solution for preventing email outages. Today we will dig a little deeper and see the possible scenarios which the email round-trip test can follow. Let me clarify what the email round-trip test actually does.

First, our monitoring agent connects to the SMTP server that you have specified or retrieved automatically through the MX records and sends a test message. By doing this, our system verifies that your SMTP server is working properly. Next, the agent will try to log into the POP3/IMAP server and retrieve the message. If the message is received, the test will be considered successful, and the message will be deleted. If, on the other hand, the message is not found in the mailbox after a certain period, which is configurable and usually between 5 and 15 minutes, the check will be considered a failure, and you will be alerted.

Since you are reading this blog, I can safely assume that you already know how e-mail works. The main problem occurs when it doesn’t. And it doesn’t matter whether you are running a business or running an errand – if your e-mail is not working, you are losing information. The truth is that most businesses experience at least one e-mail outage every year, and this downtime, combined with the recovery costs, can add up to hundreds and even thousands of dollars.

But what causes the e-mail outages?

There are many reasons why an e-mail system can stop functioning, but at first glance, the e-mail outages can be planned and unplanned.