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.

Facebook was down – this is the news making the headlines today. Quite unexpectedly for both the Facebook team and the millions of users, the social networking giant went down yesterday from 2.30 p.m. EST and recovered around 6 p.m.  resulting, in their own words,  in “the worst outage we’ve had over four years”.  The failure was also immediately detected and confirmed by all of the locations in our monitoring network.

The reason for the outage was a series of problems involving an automated system designed to verify configuration values in the cache and replace invalid values with updated values from the persistent store. An error sent system into a feedback loop that only cutting traffic to a database cluster and rebooting the site could solve.

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: