With the holidays rapidly approaching, retailers are anxiously trying to think up of new ways to get the people to open up their wallets. And this situation is not surprising - the success of the entire year will be determined to a large extent on profits generated in the next two months. Although shoppers still remain a bit reluctant to loosen the stings of their wallets, market analysts and retailers alike are much more optimistic about the results than they were last year.

A recent report by Jefferey Grau, one of eMarketer's leading analysts, predicts a 14.3% rise in online sales over the same period last year. This growth is expected to boost season sales to $38.5 billion, up from $33.7 billion last year. Grau predicts that “This holiday season consumers will open their wallets more than they have the past two years, even though they will remain extremely price-focused. Online consumers have become savvy at finding coupons, comparing prices, locating cheaper product alternatives, and exchanging shopping tactics and information about bargains with peers through social media."  The key to the hearts of the customers will be held by the retailers that manage to offer rich product information, easy return policies and friendly customer service representatives.

In order to meet the demand for mobile monitoring solutions we are proud to present our Android Server Monitoring App! We believe this mobile application will significantly increase the overall value of our services and will fill the existing gap for such a tool on the Android front. With our app you will always have control on the performance of your website and/or server. You can enjoy all the features from our mobile website, but  in an interactive and more user friendly way.

Android applications are becoming more and more popular, partially because of the fact ~57% of them are free and mostly because a lot of people love Google products. By introducing our mobile server monitoring application we are now able to provide you with an easy way to keep track of your sites everywhere you go. Instant, on-demand uptime monitoring now fits in your pocket. The app is able to update the information on a preset interval and give you notifications for important events. As always, we are opened to any suggestions for additional features. Your feedback is valuable to us so if you experience any  difficulties or have idea for another Andoid application let us know.

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.

Three months ago we launched our traditional Hurricane Season Web Performance Report. During this time we continuously monitored five of the key websites which provide real-time forecasts, details, emergency information and donation opportunities when disaster strikes.

Now it is time to officially announce its end and summarize the results. Here's what happened this year:

Which is the most reliable server hardware and operating system? Well, it turns out that the most reliable piece of hardware out there is the IBM Power 7 system, running AIX, scores at least 99.99% server uptime. This translates to 15 minutes of downtime per year. This is quite amazing. Imagine this was your web hosting provider. It is not surprising that IBM are rock solid amongst other alternatives. IBM, or International Business Machines, has nearly 100 years of history behind their backs. Some think that to succeed you need to be the first company on the market, or the best one. It seems that IBM benefits from both.

There is a lot of buzz around green computing and green data centers. We even mentioned those a couple of times. But what does “Green” mean? If environmental friendly computing translates to efficiency and workload optimization, then there you have it. There are two ways to help the environment while meeting the ever increasing demand for faster performance - make your it equipment run on green energy or make it as efficient as possible. In a perfect world you would have both, but in the most common case scenario we are still firmly attached to the power company and making the most out of the electricity you use, can really pay off. While most servers use 10% of their capacity most of the time, the Power7 series utilize up to 90% of the capacity thanks to their new virtualization capabilities.