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Performance Tracking  > 2020 Hurricane Season

WebSitePulse 2020 Hurricane Season Web Performance Report Summary


Finally, the hurricane season 2020 is now behind us. Unfortunately, it was way worse than the last year's. In 2020 in the Atlantic basin, we observed:

  • 1 Tropical depression (Ten)
  • 15 Tropical storms (Arthur, Bertha, Beta, Cristobal, Dolly, Edouard, Fay, Gamma, Gonzalo, Josephine, Kyle, Omar, Rene, Vicky, and Wilfred)
  • 4 Category 1 hurricanes (Hanna, Isaias, Marco, and Nana)
  • 3 Category 2 hurricanes (Paulette, Sally, and Zeta)
  • 1 Category 3 hurricane (Epsilon)
  • 3 Category 4 hurricanes (Delta, Laura, and Teddy)
The total damage from the Atlantic storms is more than $27.873 billion and 159 deaths.

The storms in the Pacific basin caused significantly less damage (total under 200 million and 46 deaths):
  • 5 Tropical depressions
  • 10 Tropical storms (Amanda, Boris, Cristina, Fausto, Hernan, Iselle, Julio, Karina, Lowell, and Norbert)
  • 1 Category 2 hurricane (Elida)
  • 3 Category 4 hurricane (Douglas, Genevieve, and Marie)
Along with the end of the 2020 Hurricane Season, we have finished tracking five of the most popular weather forecasts websites for our annual Hurricane Season Report.

For this Performance Report, we at WebSitePulse monitoring service measured the websites' home pages' performance and complete interaction with the website as an end-user would do.

The report measures Uptime and Response Time as the most critical 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).

The overall uptime and speed of the monitored weather websites were quite good during the whole monitored period. We have found out the daily average response time from all monitored websites was 0.640 sec. The daily average responses by locations are as follow:
  • Trumbull, CT (US East Coast) – 0.624 sec
  • San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 0.787 sec
  • Chicago, IL (US Central) – 0.511 sec

For the fourth year in a row, The National Hurricane Center (nhc.noaa.gov) was the speed leader among the five monitored websites with an average response time of 0.326 seconds, followed by redcross.org (0.389 sec). Far away at the bottom of the table once again was weather.com with 1.059 seconds average response time, which may have frustrated some of its visitors.

Comparing to the last year's performance, the two leaders decreased their response time by an average of 0.039 seconds while the slowest site this year performed on average 0.161 seconds faster than in the 2019 Hurricane Season monitored period.

The daily average uptime for the entire group of 5 websites for the 2020 hurricane season was 99.99%. The daily average uptime by locations are as follow:
  • Trumbull, CT (US East Coast) – 99.99%
  • San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 99.99%
  • Chicago, IL (US Central) – 99.99%

This year we have two winners — redcross.org and nhc.noaa.gov, which were available with no interruptions, closely followed by weather.com with 99.999% uptime. At the bottom of the availability chart stands salvationarmy.org with 99.981%, which means it was not accessible to its visitors for less than 20 minutes during the monitored period.

Average Response times for the whole period
#TargetTrumbull, CTSan Francisco, CAChicago, ILAvg. resp. time
1nhc.noaa.gov0.2870.4140.2750.326
2redcross.org0.4260.3760.3650.389
3salvationarmy.org0.9380.8770.2750.697
4floridadisaster.org0.5351.0610.6040.733
5weather.com0.9331.2081.0351.059

Average Uptime for the whole period
#TargetTrumbull, CTSan Francisco, CAChicago, ILAvg. uptime
1nhc.noaa.gov100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
2redcross.org100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
3weather.com100.000%99.996%100.000%99.999%
4floridadisaster.org99.985%99.982%99.988%99.985%
5salvationarmy.org99.986%99.983%99.976%99.981%

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".