A Closer Look at AlertBot’s Email Reports

At AlertBot, we know our customers don’t want too much data about their websites and tasks. Instead, they want clear, organized, and reliable intelligence that tells them: what happened recently, what’s happening now, what’s likely to happen in the near future — and what they can do about it. That’s where email reports enter the story.

Here are the five sections in AlertBot’s email reports: Availability, Performance, Common Errors, Failure Events, and Confirmed Failures.

Availability

The Availability section of the email report displays the overall uptime of the websites that you are testing. Additionally, it is color coded.

• Green indicates that everything is working perfectly (or nearly perfectly).
• Yellow indicates that there may be some minor concerns.
• Red indicates significant concerns that should be addressed.

Performance

The performance section of the email report provides details for the websites that you are testing. It displays a breakdown (measured in seconds) of each process, along with individual web pages that are associated with that process.

This is useful for daily website monitoring and studying long-term patterns to ensure their functionality. It helps in checking the performance of websites on a regular basis and analyzing trends over time. This is important to ensure that websites are functioning properly and meeting their objectives.

Common Errors

The email report’s common errors section shows all failures and transition errors that happened within a certain time. The list includes confirmed events, as well as those that are intermittent. Use this information to check for problems with websites or processes, or issues that need more investigating and analyzing.

Failure Events

Here, you will find a list of all confirmed failures (as indicated in the Common Errors section) for each hour in the past week. The failure events are also color coded:

• Red indicates significant areas of concern.
• Yellow indicates minor areas of concern (some confirmed failures).
• Green indicates no areas of concern.

Confirmed Failures

Finally, the confirmed failures section of the email report logs all problem areas. Notably, these have all been confirmed from a secondary location — i.e., they are actual failure events and not false positives.

With this in mind, there can be scenarios where confirmed failure events do not necessarily indicate a problem. For example, you may see that over the past week a website failed 10 times at 1:00am. However, after digging deeper you may discover that this is happening due to maintenance. If so, then you can simply set up a maintenance window.

The Final Word

In the 1990s flick Apollo 13, the big brains at NASA said that “failure is not an option.” Unfortunately, down here on earth, sometimes things in general — and websites and their related processes specifically — don’t work as expected.

Fortunately, that’s where AlertBot’s detailed, yet clear and focused, email reports make a transformative difference. It’s not just raw information. It’s actionable intelligence!

But what sets AlertBot apart is not just the information it provides, but how it presents it. Our reports are clear, concise, and focused, ensuring that you can quickly grasp the key insights without getting lost in a sea of technical jargon. We understand that not everyone is a tech expert, and that’s why we’ve made our reports accessible to all.

So why wait? Take control of your online presence and ensure that your website is running smoothly. Don’t let website issues hold you back – let AlertBot be your trusted companion in the digital realm.

Getting started with AlertBot is a breeze. With our free trial, you can experience the power of our email reports without any commitment. No need to download or install anything, and rest assured, we won’t ask for any billing information. In just a matter of minutes, you’ll be fully set up and ready to uncover the hidden potential of your website: click here.

What Exactly is a Website Monitoring “False Alarm”
and Why You Should Care About It

by Louis Kingston

You know what falsehoods are. You know what false teeth are. You may even know some falsehoods about false teeth. But do you know what a website monitoring false alarm (also known as a “false positive”) is? If not, then please keep reading to find out — because it’s a very big deal.

What is a False Alarm?

Remember back in grade school, when the fire bell suddenly went off in class and you were instructed to exit the class single-file and march outside? As you rose from your desk, heart racing, you wondered if you’d ever see your Trapper Keeper, Real Ghostbusters lunchbox and JanSport backpack ever again. But after you and your classmates were wrangled into the parking lot to stand in the brisk autumn air for what felt like an eternity, you soon learn it was just some older kid who thought it’d be funny to pull that shiny red lever on the hallway wall.

Well, that’s essentially what a false alarm is: a result that incorrectly indicates that a particular condition or attribute is present (i.e. it wasn’t a real fire consuming your place of education; it was merely a “false alarm” thanks to that jerk in the grade above yours).

What is a Website Monitoring False Alarm?

What you need and expect from a website monitoring tool is to know precisely when your website goes down. Why? Because research has found that the average cost of site downtime is $5,600 per minute. And remember, we are just talking about the average cost here. Some site downtime fiascos are much more costly. Just ask Amazon, which lost an estimated $99 million after going down for 63 minutes during Prime week in 2018. Granted, most businesses (including yours, unless you happen to be Jeff Bezos) won’t have to shell out $1.65 million a minute due to website downtime, but the basic point should be clear: site downtime is costly, and false alarms are supposed to minimize this financial damage.

But what happens when a website monitoring downtime alarm goes off, but nothing is actually wrong? It gets chalked up to a false alarm.

Why Website Monitoring False Alarms Are So Common

Many website monitoring tools — and virtually all of the free kind — have a test server in one location. If that test server detects that a website is not available, it does the only thing it can: sound the alarm. And that seems to be the correct thing to do, right? Well, not exactly.

Let’s say that that the website in this example is only down for a few seconds due to an isolated power outage. The test server has no way of knowing this (i.e. that the website is back up). And so, it is going to generate a false alarm.

The Solution: Multiple Testing Server Locations

Now, imagine that there are multiple test servers spread out across the country — say, one in New York and one in Los Angeles. The test server in New York detects that a website has gone down, and triggers a red alert (this test server is a big Star Trek fan). But it doesn’t sound the alarm. Instead, 60 seconds later the test server in Los Angeles checks in. If the website is up, then it cancels the red alert. If the website is down, then it confirms the initial diagnosis by the test server in New York, and the alarm goes off.

The AlertBot Advantage

At AlertBot, we hate false alarms even more than our customers. That’s why unlike many other website monitoring tools — and again, virtually all of the free ones — we have test servers located across the U.S. and worldwide. We don’t guess whether our customer’s website is down. We know.

Plus, when it is necessary to send out an alert, our system automatically and immediately contacts key people — such as network administrators, SysAdmins, CIOs, etc. — through email, SMS/text message, or phone (or any combination).

What’s more, our test servers keep checking for website site availability, and provide an update (again, in the preferred method) if it goes back up. We also highlight the amount of time that the website — or a specific portion/page of the website — was down. Our customers use this information to keep an eye on overall website performance, proactively detect problems, and ensure that their web host is consistently meeting uptime standards.

Ready to bid false alarms a true farewell? Then start a FREE TRIAL of AlertBot now. There’s no billing information required, no installation, and you’ll be setup within minutes. Click here.

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and their German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

We used AlertBot’s external website monitoring system and its TrueBrowser™ technology to monitor both sites for a couple weeks, spanning from July 1 to July 22, 2018. As both sites and services are continuing to grow and change (Heaven knows MoviePass will probably change their rules and operations again before you finish reading this sentence), we weren’t surprised to see how similar the sites for each service performed.

Reliability

For the reliability evaluation of a website, we look for failure events (like when a page doesn’t fully load or it is completely down), and we look for what caused those failures.

Both MoviePass and Sinemia performed well here, but one did seem to struggle a little more than the other.

MoviePass.com experienced a 98.2% average uptime due to several days where the site seemed to perform slower than usual, causing the pages to not load fully – even triggering a strange account lookup error on the front page for several hours on July 14^th. This resulted in 18 failure events cataloged by AlertBot, with an average failure time of 32 minutes. This doesn’t mean downtime, per say, but the details did show that the site was struggling with its speed and load times. (MoviePass.com 7/10)

Comparatively, Sinemia.com saw 99.98% uptime with 1 failure event, although it wasn’t anything that spelled major downtime. At worst, it appeared to be a slow page / busy error that didn’t last long enough to qualify as site downtime. Overall, Sinemia proved to be pretty reliable. (Sinemia.com 9/10)

Speed

When evaluating a website’s speed, we look at the time it takes the site’s homepage to render and load to the point of being fully interactive by the user. These tests are performed from the perspective of a first-time visitor with no prior cache of the website’s content. AlertBot runs the tests inside real Firefox web browsers using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser™ monitoring.

MoviePass.com saw acceptable page load speeds overall, with their best average day being Wednesday, July 4^th with 3.9 seconds. The best time of day was 1am on Friday, July 20^th (which isn’t a popular time to even be using a site like theirs) at an average of just 1.6 seconds. On the other side of the proverbial coin, the slowest day was Saturday, July 14 with an average time of 8.9 seconds, and the worst time of day was also on the same day at noon (yikes!) with an embarrassing 14.1 seconds.  (MoviePass.com 7.5/10)

Sinemia actually didn’t perform too much better, with their best average speed for a single day being Saturday, July 21 with 5.4 seconds and their best time of day being Wednesday, July 4^th at 5pm with 2.7 seconds. Their slowest day was Monday, July 23^rd with 7.3 seconds, with the slowest time being on July 2^nd at 10pm with 10.2 seconds. (Sinemia.com 8/10)

Geographic

It’s always interesting to see how sites perform differently across the world. If we look exclusively at the United States, it’s intriguing to see which states regularly see faster or slower times than others.

MoviePass.com performed the fastest in California with 1.8 seconds, with Florida coming in second at 2.4 seconds. The site performed slowest in Missouri with a sluggish 10.2 seconds, with Utah coming in second at 8.5 seconds. (MoviePass.com 8/10)

For Sinemia.com, California was also the fastest at 2.9 seconds, and Virginia was second fastest at 3.5 seconds. Missouri was also the slowest, at 11.3 seconds, with Utah being second slowest at 9.1 seconds. (Sinemia.com 7.5/10)

Neither site was all that impressive in the nature of speed – which is interesting considering there isn’t a whole lot of content on their websites to slow them down.

Usability

For usability, we select a common task a user might typically try to accomplish when visiting the sites and replicate it. For our previous Showdowns, we tested things like going through the motions of ordering movie tickets from a local theater or simply adding a similar item to both sites’ shopping carts. For this Showdown, we’ll see what the experience is like to use their respective websites to start the service signup process (but not complete any forms).

For each of these processes, we started by opening a new tab in Google Chrome and typing in the site’s URL.

From the point of typing www.moviepass.com into our Chrome browser, it took a mere 18 seconds and 2 clicks to see their plans and get to the signup form. It was a piece of cake.

For Sinemia.com, it was actually just as smooth. In 17 seconds and 2 clicks, we were able to select a plan and get to the signup page.

It’s a tough call for usability. They’re simple processes, but they get the job done and we have no complaints.

All things considered, here are the Usability scores:

(MoviePass.com 10/10)
(Sinemia.com 10/10)

Verdict

The usability usually isn’t this straightforward and clear for both sites, so it leaves us to look almost exclusively at the other categories to draw a conclusion.

Without assuming MoviePass may have more hiccups in speed due to a greater deal of traffic, Sinemia.com seems to be a clearer choice for reliability as a whole, but the sites are quite close. That bad day on July 14 also really hurt MoviePass’s performance during this evaluation period, but it can’t be ignored. So, with that said, we believe the verdict is…

Winner:

When Does Most Website Downtime Occur?

To become competitive in the global market, it’s crucial for your business to have a strong online presence. One of the best ways to ensure this is to have a user-friendly business website that is accessible ’round the clock. And if your customers rely heavily on your website, you know that any amount of time your site is down could be rather costly.

Frankly, website downtime is inevitable. Even the big online giants like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, eBay, YouTube, Amazon and CNN have experienced website downtime at some point.  However, the good news is that you can mitigate the risk and lower the length of time your site remains inactive if you are familiar with some of the likely causes of website downtime.

Let’s dig a little deeper to find out the common causes of site downtime:

§  Server Overload

Server overloads occur when a big wave of online traffic overwhelms a server. Now, there are two situations when this happens. First, it happens if your site is being hosted on a shared server. Resources on shared servers are limited and they have to be stretched to support high volumes of traffic and site-processing needs, which can cause server overload. As a result, your site may be inaccessible to users for hours.

Second, server overloads may also happen on major online shopping days, like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or any other occasion for that matter, when you have significant discount deals and special sales running on your website. Such deals draw in heavy traffic, thus increasing the chances of server overload and site downtime.

§  Hardware Failures

Server and network failures can bring a website to a screeching halt in no time flat. This could be caused by things like hard drive failures, power supply failures, circuit board failures, or cabling failures. It can also be caused by more troubling failures like data center infrastructure failures or network peering failures.

§  Webmaster Errors

Your business may experience downtime because of errors caused by the site’s webmaster. For example, your site may not be accessible to your audience if your webmaster forgets to renew the site’s hosting contract or domain name.

§  Coding Errors

Some common coding errors are incorrect syntax, infinite loops and typos. All of these errors can exhaust the resources of the server and yield 500 (Internal Server) error codes, resulting in website downtime.

§  Cyber Attack

With the surge in cyber crime, you need to make sure that your website is well-protected from cybercriminals, hackers and viral infections. Cybercriminals know how to hijack websites and redirect your site visitors to other websites or expose them to malicious content.

All of this can result in lengthy website downtime, which can be detrimental to your business sales, profits and reputation. And that is definitely something that no business owner wants! One way to help prevent cyber attacks is to keep your IT team, and those directly responsible for the health of your website and server, in the know about the latest cyber threats.

§  Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS)

Also known as DDoS, Distributed Denial of Service Attacks can also bring your online business to a standstill. DDoS are planned attacks. In these instances, heavy traffic is deliberately directed from different sources to cause servers to overload and, in some cases, crash entirely.

§  Natural Disasters

Website downtime may also occur when your data center is hit by a natural disaster like floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, etc.

§  Planned Downtime or Server Maintenance

Lastly, if you have a dedicated server, you may need to go offline for server maintenance. This usually involves upgrading hardware components, drivers, operating systems, firmware, and even software applications. With these planned occurrences, you can alert customers ahead of time to the planned outage, which can help combat and minimize the effect it may have on your business.

Knowing the reasons for, and causes of, website downtime is crucial as it will help you devise and implement the right mix of strategies to overcome and avoid it.

AlertBot’s external website monitoring service exists to help businesses like yours to identify and fix website errors when they happen and hopefully prevent future downtime. Visit www.AlertBot.com for more information and to signup for a free, no-risk trial.

How Much Impact Does an Hour of Website Downtime Have on a Business?

So, your business website is offline again and your IT team has sprung into action, trying to pinpoint the issue and fix it as soon as possible. Sure, it’s good that your IT experts are handling the problem responsibly, but do you know how much money your business may have lost during your website’s downtime? Well, if you are a major player in the ecommerce industry, chances are you could have lost millions of dollars by now. And that is not an overstatement.

Like it or not, even an hour of downtime can do a great deal of damage to your online business. Did you know that in 2014, Google experienced downtime which was caused by a virus and all Gmail, Google+ and Google Drive were affected by it? This downtime lasted for an hour, which decreased Google stocks by 2.4 percent.

But that’s not all! Amazon, the e-shopping giant, experienced 2 hours of downtime, presenting site visitors with cryptic HTTP messages. In just 2 hours, Amazon lost an estimated total of $3.48 million. That’s huge!

So, if you wish to estimate the true cost of an hour of website downtime has to your business, then you’ve come to the right place. Here are some of the more important variables you must consider when calculating this cost:

§  Impact on Business Sales

To figure out exactly how much an episode of website downtime costs in terms of sales lost, you’d need to determine what your average profits per minute are during the time period the downtime occurred. You can then multiply that average profit per minute times the number of downtime minutes to determine your total lost sales profits. If the downtime occurs at 2 in the afternoon, for example, it is most likely going to cost your business more sales than if the outage had happened at, say, 2 in the morning, when web traffic is typically much lighter.

§  Damage Done to Your Business Reputation

Downtime (especially if it’s frequent or at a crucial time) can scar your business’s reputation, losing the trust and loyalty of customers in your brand. Just like many businesses, you too have invested good money and a great deal of time in brand building. Your time and money can go to waste if you experience downtime—even if it is for just an hour. When considering the true cost of your site’s downtime, it is important that you keep in mind the resources you’ll need to spend to repair your tainted brand image going forward.

§  Money Wasted in Marketing Campaigns

Another factor to consider when determining the cost is the money you have invested in your marketing efforts, like PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns. You need to figure out the amount of money that was spent on marketing while your site was experiencing downtime. This is important to calculate, because let’s face it – you literally didn’t reap any benefits from the invested money, because your site was inaccessible when prospects clicked on the PPC link or advertisement.

Prevention is Always Best!

Calculating the cost you might have incurred due to an hour of website downtime is essential, but there are precautions you can take to avoid unplanned downtime and keep your business up and running ’round the clock (and be a hero!). AlertBot is an intuitive web-based website monitoring service that can alert your team about website errors and slowness within seconds, and also help you keep track of your site performance. All of this is much needed to mitigate downtime issues significantly. Start the AlertBot 14-day free trial today!

While websites like Walmart, Fanatics and QVC experienced a couple several-minute outages on Thanksgiving Day, one of the sites that seemed to struggle the most on Black Friday this year was the online destination for department store Neiman Marcus. The site even experienced a downtime of two hours in the morning.

Second only to NeimanMarcus.com, however, is online tech retailer Newegg.com, who experienced some slow page load times no doubt due to the heightened traffic. Finally, Staples.com also experienced some short outages, but nothing more than a few minutes each.

Through Saturday and Sunday, it was much of the same with Neiman Marcus, Staples and Newegg, with Walmart seeing a few hiccups and Shutterfly.com experiencing a 45-minute outage due to the server being overloaded with traffic. Sony’s Playstation Network also experienced some significant downtime on Saturday, which also affected their online store.

Downtime of any length can be costly for any online retailer. According to this article by Evolven.com, “The average cost of data center downtime across industries was $5,600 per minute.” Clearly, that would add up real quick – especially on a major shopping day.

With AlertBot’s monitoring services, not only can you be alerted the moment your site experiences an outage or slow load times, but you’ll be able to use the AlertBot charts and reports to find potential hang-ups and future problems that will result in unnecessary downtime.

Give AlertBot a try with our totally free trial period and start seeing how AlertBot can look out for your business to help you prevent serious financial loss and online disasters.

Get Your Website Ready For Holiday Traffic

It’s that time of year again. As we say farewell to summer and prepare for the coming of autumn next week, online retailers are faced with one harsh reality: Black Friday is a mere two months away. And while that may seem like a long time from now to some, now is really the time for preparation. And just like any brick and mortar retailer needs to have their store ready to go with employees on hand to wrangle the shopping masses, websites need to make sure their site is tuned up and ready for an influx of traffic.

If you’re feeling pretty confident that you’re ready and that this warning may seem premature or unnecessary altogether, let’s take a moment to spotlight last year’s Black Friday festivities and pitfalls.

The biggest name to have experienced major website failures last November was electronics retail chain Best Buy. Issues were recorded and reported on throughout the day on Black Friday and it sent social media abuzz with chatter and complaints about the site’s performance—or lack thereof.

Best Buy wasn’t the only one affected, however. Computer company HP’s webstore also experienced failure, while in the UK, online stores Currys (electronics), Argos (department store) and Tesco (groceries) all went down as well.

So what can we glean from this?

If you’re an online retailer, you’re probably already thinking about the holidays and getting prepared, but now is the most crucial time to not only make sure you have reliable website monitoring, but to evaluate your website’s performance so you can make improvements before the big online sale days. And you’re in luck – AlertBot can assist with your performance evaluation and help you rest assured that your site will perform better in time for the holidays. Try it out for free with our 14-day trial.