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Performance Tracking  > 2018 Hurricane Season

WebSitePulse 2018 Hurricane Season Web Performance Report Summary


Hurricane season is finally over and our annual Hurricane Season Web Performance Report where we monitor five of the most popular weather forecasting websites is done.

For the purpose of this Performance Report, WebSitePulse measured the performance of the websites home pages as well as a complete web transaction like an end user would interact with the website.

The report measures Uptime and Response Time as the most important metrics for the availability and the reliability of all web-based operations. Measurements of the multi-step online transactions were made every 15 minutes, simultaneously from 3 different monitoring locations: Trumbull, CT (US East Coast), San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) and Chicago, IL (US Central).

This year’s hurricane season was quite intense. We observed 7 tropical storms (Alberto, Debby, Ernesto, Gordon, Joyce, Kirk and Nadine) and 8 hurricanes (Beryl, Chris, Florence, Helene, Isaac, Leslie, Michael and Oscar). Despite that fact the overall uptime and speed of the monitored weather websites were quite good during the whole period with exception of one big disturbance on Aug 27 th when NHC first mentioned the possibility of tropical cyclone formation which eventually evolved to the hurricane Florence.

We have found out the daily average response time from all monitored websites was 0.900 sec. The daily average responses by locations are as follow:

  • Trumbull, CT (US East Coast) – 0.884 sec
  • San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 1.034 sec
  • Chicago, IL (US Central) – 0.784 sec

Second year in a row The National Hurricane Center (nhc.noaa.gov) was the speed leader among the 5 monitored websites with an average response time of 0.369 seconds, followed once again by salvationarmy.org (0.539 sec). Far away at the bottom of the table was weather.com with 1.797 seconds average response time which may have frustrated some of its visitors.

Comparing to the last year’s performance, the 2 leaders decreased their response time by average of 0.132 seconds while the slowest site this year performed on average 0.165 seconds faster than in 2017 Hurricane Season monitored period.

The daily average uptime for the entire group of 5 websites for 2017 hurricane season was 99.80%. The daily average uptime by locations are as follow:

  • Trumbull, CT (US East Coast) – 99.80%
  • San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 99.81%
  • Chicago, IL (US Central) – 99.81%

The winner with 100% average uptime for this year’s hurricane season is nhc.noaa.gov, followed by weather.com (99.986%). At the bottom of the availability chart stands floridadisaster.org with 99.140% which means it was not accessible to its customers for nearly 19 hour during the monitored period.

Average Response times for the whole period
#TargetTrumbull, CTSan Francisco, CAChicago, ILAvg. resp. time
1nhc.noaa.gov0.2790.4250.4040.369
2salvationarmy.org0.5320.7800.3040.539
3redcross.org0.6310.5990.5660.599
4floridadisaster.org1.0751.3851.1301.197
5weather.com1.8981.9791.5161.797

Average Uptime for the whole period
#TargetTrumbull, CTSan Francisco, CAChicago, ILAvg. uptime
1nhc.noaa.gov100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
2weather.com99.992%99.986%99.979%99.986%
3salvationarmy.org99.970%99.966%99.965%99.967%
4redcross.org99.919%99.934%99.939%99.930%
5floridadisaster.org99.132%99.157%99.132%99.140%

Best regards, and takeITeasy™ with WebSitePulse™

Iavor Marinoff, CEO

Report Methodology:
WebSitePulse Performance Reports measure Uptime and Response Time as the most important metrics for the availability and the reliability of any web-based operation. Performance measurement took place daily, every 15 minutes during the entire Hurricane season, between the hours of 6AM and 3AM EST. The WebSitePulse website monitoring service was used to collect data and to create the reports.
The simultaneous monitoring is performed from 3 US locations of the WebSitePulse monitoring network: Trumbull, CT, San Francisco, CA and Chicago, IL. In case of a detected malfunction or unavailability, the system performs automated error verification from 3 independent resources and only after the above procedure is performed and has returned consistent results, the detected error is confirmed, recorded, and included in the daily performance reports. In these cases, an advanced WebSitePulse exclusive feature comes into play - Forced Monitoring - which automatically switches to a 3 minute - monitoring interval for increased accuracy.

About WebSitePulse:
WebSitePulse is a leading provider of global, independent, and objective availability and performance monitoring of web sites, servers, network components, web applications, e-business- and email round-trip transactions.

Contact:
For more information about this report please contact:
George T., CTO
phone: 1-407-380-1600
email:


Reproduction:
WebSitePulse launched the Performance and Uptime Reports program to keep the general public and the Internet community informed about the performance of specific websites and the challenges their webmasters, owners and operators are facing on a daily basis, especially when the web traffic intensifies due to some special events through the year. Some of the most popular web destinations, related to each particular event, are selected for the purpose of the Reports, and data from their performance measurements is made available on the WebSitePulse public website.

With the intention to broadly disseminate this information for the benefit of the Internet community, we encourage the use of this information without prior approval and under the following Terms and Conditions:

The Data from the performance measurements cannot be changed or manipulated and should be used "as is".