Unpacking the Elements of Site Uptime (by way of Jeopardy!)

Picture this: you’ve achieved your second lifelong dream of being a contestant on Jeopardy! Now it’s time for the fateful “final answer.”

The good news? You’ve got a comfortable lead over your fellow contestants, and a correct response means eternal bragging rights.

The bad news? Miss this one, and everyone — your family, coworkers, dentist, mechanic — will remind you of it forever.

The lights dim. The audience holds its breath. The final answer appears:

“This is the catch-all term used to describe monitoring URL availability, tracking load times, verifying page elements, and pinpointing problems.”

The contestant to your left groans. The one to your right freezes like a Buckingham Palace guard. You, however, calmly write down your response, so fast a little smoke drifts from your fingertips:

“What is website uptime monitoring?”

The crowd erupts. You win big. Fame, glory… and maybe that long-dreamed-of RV.

Then your alarm clock goes off.

So, no RV — and those overdue library fines remain — but you’ve woken up knowing something valuable: what comprehensive website uptime monitoring actually means.

Why It Matters

Many uptime monitoring tools — especially free ones — only check whether a site is up or down. But as your Jeopardy-inspired dream revealed, true website uptime monitoring goes much deeper. It includes:

• Tracking Load Times:
  Slow-loading sites frustrate users and hurt conversions. Google also factors site speed and responsiveness into its search rankings, so a sluggish site can drag down visibility and traffic.
• Verifying Page Elements:
  Modern websites aren’t just static pages — they’re complex mini-apps with scripts, APIs, and interactive features. If a critical element fails to load, the visitor’s experience (and trust) takes a hit.
• Pinpointing Problems:
  Finding what’s broken shouldn’t feel like hunting for a needle in a haystack. Advanced monitoring tools highlight exactly where issues occur — whether it’s a timeout, script error, or third-party slowdown — so your team can fix it fast.
• Monitoring URL Availability:
  The foundation of all uptime monitoring — confirming that your site responds as expected, from multiple locations around the world, 24/7.

Putting It All Together

Now that you know the elements of true uptime monitoring — availability checks, load time tracking, page verification, and issue diagnosis — you can choose a solution that covers every angle.

AlertBot, for instance, provides all of these capabilities in one comprehensive platform. It monitors full page loads, validates key site elements, alerts you the moment something goes wrong, and delivers detailed diagnostics to speed up resolution.

No, it’s not quite as exciting as winning on Jeopardy! (and showing your high-school crush what they missed). But when you consider the massive costs of downtime, slow performance, or broken functionality, reliable uptime monitoring is the real prize.

Instead of lying awake worrying about your site, you’ll sleep soundly — dreaming of your next game show conquest. (The Price Is Right, anyone?)

Real estate professionals have said for years that the three most important factors about a property are location, location, and location. Well, for organizations with a web presence — which these days is the vast majority, and 100% of e-commerce companies — the three most important factors about their site are visitor experience, visitor experience, and (let’s all say it together!) visitor experience.

Visitors want, expect, and frankly demand a flawless experience where everything loads quickly and works perfectly the first time: every button, every graphic, every form, every page. Consider the following statistics:

• 47% of visitors will not wait longer than two seconds for a site to load.
• 88% of visitors will not return to a site after a single bad experience.
• 57% of visitors say they will not recommend a business that offers a bad experience.

Naturally, when it comes to delivering a perfect visitor experience, organizations cannot “cross their fingers and hope for the best.” Instead, they must be proactive and rigorously test their site to find and fix issues — before their visitors do. And that brings us to two heavyweights in the site monitoring world: Real User Monitoring and Synthetic Monitoring.

Real User Monitoring

Real User Monitoring (RUM) uses passive techniques (i.e., it does not disrupt the visitor experience) to continuously observe, collect, and analyze actions and interactions — with a primary focus on availability, functionality, and responsiveness.

Synthetic Monitoring

Synthetic Monitoring simulates common and critical user journeys on a website to detect issues and benchmark performance — before real users ever encounter a problem.

Issues with Real User Monitoring

Some site uptime software vendors make bold claims that Real User Monitoring is vastly superior to Synthetic Monitoring (of course, these same vendors only offer RUM, so their bias is predictable).

However, when we look past the marketing hype, it’s clear that RUM isn’t always ready for prime time. Specifically, here are seven drawbacks that are often downplayed or overlooked:

1. Data Dependency
   To be effective, RUM requires a vast amount of traffic data — which many organizations simply don’t have. They may catch some issues, but without enough data, many problems will go unnoticed… until visitors discover them first.
2. Site Changes Disrupt Accuracy
   Even if you have adequate traffic, RUM’s usefulness can diminish — or even become irrelevant — after a major site update. It can take weeks or months to gather new behavioral data and accurately assess the user experience post-change.
3. Implementation Complexity
   RUM is compelling in theory but can be difficult to implement and manage. Visitor behavior is highly variable, and the resulting data can be inconsistent and complex to query, interpret, and visualize.
4. Lack of Consistent Benchmarking
   Monitoring performance over time requires reliable baselines. But inconsistent traffic and diverse user environments (browsers, devices, regions) make meaningful comparisons difficult with RUM.
5. Too Much Data, Too Little Insight
   Ironically, even when data volume is high, it can become a burden. RUM casts a wide net, making it difficult and time-consuming to filter through noise and find actionable insights.
6. Blind Spots Outside the Site
   RUM often fails to identify performance issues caused by external factors, such as third-party services or network latency. This can leave teams guessing about root causes and delay resolution.
7. Unexpected Costs
   RUM solutions can be surprisingly expensive to implement and maintain — especially for enterprises with large user bases. The time-to-value may be far longer (and costlier) than vendors lead you to believe.

The Final Word

Real User Monitoring isn’t a liability — but it’s not a silver bullet either. Vendors should be transparent that RUM is not automatically “better” just because it reflects actual user behavior. Like any tool, it has limitations that must be considered in context.

For many organizations — especially larger ones — Synthetic Monitoring offers a more powerful, practical, and profitable solution. Because it doesn’t rely on real user traffic, it excels at the most critical job: finding problems before your visitors do. Click here to learn more about Synthetic Monitoring.

AlertBot: A Leader in Synthetic Monitoring

AlertBot is proud to be one of the world’s most trusted website monitoring platforms. Leading organizations like Microsoft, Disney, Dell, Forbes, and Adidas — just to name a few — rely on our robust and proven Synthetic Monitoring tools.

But you don’t have to take our word for it. Start your 100% free, no-obligation trial today. There’s nothing to install, no credit card required, and you’ll be up and running in minutes — on your way to delivering a flawless user experience.

Remember: making a great impression the first time — and every time — isn’t optional. In today’s hyper-competitive digital world, it’s essential.
Click here to start your free trial now.

100% Solutions, Zero Snark: What Makes AlertBot Customer Support Superior

Let’s start with a blatant truth: If we tell you that AlertBot offers “superior customer support,” then you are perfectly within your rights to respond with a tepid “meh,” or perhaps an irritated “so what?”

Why? Because EVERY COMPANY in this industry claims to offer amazing customer support. Of course, many of them provide mediocre customer service, and a few of them deliver awful customer service. But according to their advertising, marketing, and sales team, their customer service is nothing short of blissful and life-changing.

And so, to get back to the point: We understand that you might shrug and roll your eyes when we claim to offer incredible customer service. You’ve heard that generic song sung before by many companies, many times. It was nice at first, then it became boring, and now it’s just annoying.

At AlertBot, we don’t just talk about providing superior customer support, we back up this claim with action, and stake our reputation on it. Here is what you can expect:

• You will always connect with a qualified expert.

Have you ever asked a company for help, and quickly realized that YOU know more about the product or service than THEY do? It’s a scary, sinking feeling. Kind of like boarding a plane and seeing the pilot leafing through a copy of “Flying for Dummies.”

We are not about causing uneasy, sinking feelings. When you contact our team, you will always connect with a qualified expert. Be assured that your assigned expert understands our solution and technology inside and out, and also has vast experience dealing with various use cases and scenarios.

And in the rare event that your assigned expert cannot answer your question or solve your problem, then they will take full ownership, stay focused, and achieve a resolution as quickly as possible. They will take your matter as seriously as you do — perhaps even more.

You might be thinking: “This sounds good, but isn’t it the norm?” The answer is no. Experts aren’t cheap and easy to find (and keep!). Many companies cut corners in this area by staffing their support team with untrained, unqualified people who take 10 times as long to solve a problem 1/10^th as competently.

• You can always expect a timely response.

When customers contact our support team, they aren’t doing it because they have a new joke they want to share, or want to discuss the latest Taylor Swift rumor. They are calling us because they have a PROBLEM THAT THEY WANT TO SOLVE.

It could be a relatively minor problem, or it could be a large scale 5-alarm whopper of a crisis. Regardless of the scope: our customers contact us because they need something to happen or stop happening — and FAST.

We get it. And that’s why we respond rapidly to all support requests, and treat them as urgent and time sensitive. Many other companies don’t do this, and some simply can’t because they don’t have the qualified people — or enough of the qualified people.

• We are very friendly.

As customers — either getting support for something we own personally, or on behalf of our company —we have all been there many times: we (eventually) get the technical answers and help we need, but the experience is something between unpleasant and humiliating. Sadly, some people cannot feel smart unless they go out of their way to try and make other people feel stupid.

At AlertBot, we are all about educating and empowering our customers. We are professional and friendly, and actively LISTEN to our customers to fully understand their issues, so that we can determine the best way to approach and address them. We’re about solutions, not snark!

In fact, many of our customers have formed relationships over the years with different members of our support team, and ask for them by name. We see that as a clear sign that we are doing the right things, the right way.

What’s more, we communicate effectively and clearly with different types of roles. When we’re communicating with technical experts, we speak fluent techie, right down to the smallest, geekiest detail. And when we’re communicating with CEOs and other non-technical leaders, we focus on objectives, timelines, expectations, and the big picture — because that’s what matters most.

Straight from Our Customers

To prove that we “walk the talk,” here is a sampling of what some AlertBot customers have say about their customer support experience:

• “The other thing that sets AlertBot apart is true world class support. In my role, my team has to work with many other technical support teams and I can tell you that the team we work with at AlertBot is not only very knowledgeable, but are also very easy to work with and are super-fast to respond to our needs.”

• “I’ve used AlertBot at several companies – the level of customer support and uptime have kept me a customer.”

• “This product was very easy to setup and use. Tech support has been very responsive and knowledgeable, which is very important to me.”

• “Very happy with the product and service.”

• “We cannot say anything bad about it. They respond quickly to support requests and emails too.
  Highly recommend it.”

• “Easy to use, great Customer Service/Support Team.”

You will find many more reviews at Capterra.com (customer support rating 5/5), SoftwareAdvice.com (customer support rating 5/5), and G2.com (customer support rating 9.8/10).

Discover why some of the world’s largest and most successful companies trust AlertBot — and our legendary customer support! — to keep their websites operational and optimized.

Start a free trial of AlertBot today. There is nothing to download or install, no billing no billing information is required, and you will be 100% setup in minutes. Get started now: click here.

Synthetic Monitoring: Frequently Asked Questions

One of the most important features in a comprehensive enterprise-grade web monitoring solution is synthetic monitoring. Below, we answer some frequently asked questions, so that you can clearly understand what this is, how it works, and why it’s essential vs. optional.

What is synthetic monitoring?

Simply put, synthetic monitoring is a method simulating the journeys that visitors take on a website, and then evaluating performance. The main purpose is to proactively identify errors or bottlenecks (so your team can fix them), including hard-to-find flaws that may be associated with variables such as browsers, devices, geography or network. Synthetic monitoring is also ideal for improving and optimizing performance (i.e., making transactions and workflows faster and simpler).

What are some critical insights that synthetic monitoring can reveal?

Synthetic monitoring can provide answers to core questions such as:

• How fast is our website response time at the moment?
• Are all our complex transactions (e.g., filling out forms, adding items to carts, etc.) functioning correctly and optimally?
• What areas of our website receive a limited amount of traffic, and is this normal and expected or a potential problem?
• If we are experiencing a failure or slowdown, where exactly is it?

How does synthetic monitoring work?

Essentially, there are three steps to setting up and implementing synthetic monitoring:

1. Create scripts that simulate visitor interaction and behavior.
2. Collect data gleaned from scripts.
3. Analyze collected information so you can fix identified problems and optimize performance.

What is the difference between synthetic monitoring and journey monitoring?

They are the same thing, although generally the term synthetic monitoring is more common across leading web monitoring solutions.

How can synthetic monitoring help improve competitive advantage?

Synthetic monitoring is ideal for benchmarking performance against competitors. You can also use it to simulate traffic from different geographic locations to track APIs, SaaS products, etc. This can be especially helpful for identifying peak markets. And synthetic monitoring can help safeguard your business during times of anticipated traffic spikes (e.g., Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc.), by alerting you of any problems right away so you can make sure your website doesn’t miss a beat.

How can synthetic monitoring help improve third-party vendor compliance and performance?

You can use synthetic monitoring to help ensure that SaaS vendors are meeting their Service Level Agreement (SLA) commitments.

We are using, or thinking of using, real user monitoring. Is this sufficient?

In the distant past this was probably fine, but these days synthetic monitoring is far superior and widely recommended by experts. Here is why: real user monitoring (RUM) uses real collected user data instead of simulated data to evaluate website performance in-the-moment and over time.

In theory, this is good. But in practice, it’s problematic because there can be use cases and workflows that visitors may not trigger, but nevertheless represent performance pitfalls and other vulnerabilities. The scope of synthetic monitoring is much wider and deeper, and it’s not limited to what visitors may or may not have done in the past, or are doing at the current time. RUM is a lake, while synthetic monitoring is an ocean.

How can we learn more about synthetic monitoring?

Easy! Just sign up for a FREE TRIAL of AlertBot. There is no billing information required, no installation, and you’ll be set up in minutes. And there is even better news!

AlertBot’s celebrated multi-step synthetic monitoring script recorder is simple and easy to use. Just click record, interact with your website (e.g., fill out forms, add items to your cart, etc.), and then upload your completed script to dive deep into the granular workflow details. You will clearly see what’s working and what isn’t, as well as what should be improved to optimize visitor experience. There is NO programming required!

Start your FREE TRIAL of AlertBot now: click here.

Three Advanced Notification Features that Your Site Uptime Monitoring Vendor MUST Deliver

To say that site uptime vendors deliver notifications is about as insightful as saying that cars have steering wheels, planes have wings, or TikTok videos have cringe. It’s a given.  

But this doesn’t mean that all vendors use the same notification playbook. Some vendors offer basic (read: superficial) notification features, while others offer advanced notification features that include: 

1. Multiple Notification Methods

Within minutes of unresponsive site behavior (and after verification that the issue is not a “false positive”), a designated individual in your organization — such as a sysadmin, network specialist, etc. — should be notified of the problem via email, text and/or automated phone call. The use of multiple notification methods increases the chances of a quick response.  

2. Customizable Notifications

If a detected failure continues, you have the ability to configure your monitor settings to notify even more members of your team, or other departments. This assures you that long-lasting events get all the eyes on them as needed.

3. Comprehensive Site Issue Notification

There is more to site uptime than just availability. In other words: a site may be online and accessible, but certain processes within the site — such as those involving checkout, signing-in, customer portals, etc. — may be malfunctioning. You need to be notified of these issues as well, since they can be just as costly and damaging to your reputation as your entire site going down.

The Bottom Line

Site uptime notification is essentially about one thing: discovering issues BEFORE your customers and visitors, so that you can rapidly target and solve the problem(s). Choosing a vendor that checks both of these boxes is not only a good idea, considering the potential costs and consequences to your revenue and reputation, it is a mandatory move.

AlertBot’s advanced notification feature supports: multiple notification methods (email, text and phone), automatic notification escalation, and comprehensive site issue notification. Discover why leading organizations around the world choose AlertBot. Launch your free trial.  

“We’ve been using AlertBot for over eight years now. We were sick of finding out about problems with our website from end users first. While there are varying levels of complexity to AlertBot monitors, even the simple alerts let us know almost instantly when we have an issue. The prioritization of alerting groups and timing allow us to automatically escalate the notifications if someone is not immediately able to respond.” – Chris C., IT Director 

Read other verified customer reviews here!

What is Proactive ScriptAssist and Why is it a Game-Changer?

Sometimes — not often, but every now and then — we come across an invention that is so remarkably useful, that we wonder: how did I survive without this?

High speed internet comes to mind. So do GPS devices. And who wants to imagine a world without the cronut?

Well, it’s time to add one more invention to the list: Proactive ScriptAssist.

The Back Story
Websites are not static things. They change over time; sometimes in minor ways, and other times in major ways (for fun, check out the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to see what some of your favorite websites looked like in the past — like Apple’s home page from 1996 which invites folks to learn about “the future of the Macintosh”).

Now, for visitors, the fact that websites constantly change is not a problem. In fact, it’s often a good thing because the change is an update, addition, or improvement of some kind.

But for IT and InfoSec professionals who are in charge of (among other things) website monitoring in their company, these changes can — and often do — trigger all kinds of bugs and errors. Fields and forms stop working, elements stop loading (or they load v..e..r..y….s..l..o..w..l..y), and there can be security vulnerabilities as well.

Multi-Step Monitoring
Thankfully, there is a way to verify that everything is working before site visitors start sounding the alarm bells — or worse, disappearing never to return.

This method is to implement an easy-to-use web recorder to create scripts of what site visitors actually/ typically do on various web pages, and make sure that everything is working properly. This is highly effective. That’s the good news.

The not-so-good news, is that when changes occur — even fairly small ones — re-scripting monitors can be a complex process that, in some scenarios, may require a level of expertise and experience that some IT/InfoSec professionals don’t have.

What’s the solution to this obstacle? Let’s all say it together: Proactive ScriptAssist!

About Proactive ScriptAssist
Available EXCLUSIVELY from AlertBot, Proactive Script Assist is an optional plan that includes the following:

• Our team watches over an account, and proactively re-scripts any monitors that fail. We do all of the work, and our team has years of experience. After all, we created the technology, and we know how it works!
• Failing monitors are evaluated within 3 hours, and the customer is notified of the situation.
• Failing monitors are re-scripted within 3 to 24 hours (our response time is rapid, but the actual duration depends on the complexity — some re-scripting efforts take longer than others).
• Customers get unlimited re-scripting and configuration updates from our team year-round.

Plus, if needed our team offers advanced support over remote desktop sessions (join.me sessions). This is not always necessary, but it is another layer of help just in case.

The Bottom Line
Inventions that changed our lives: High speed internet. GPS. Cronuts. And now, AlertBot’s Proactive ScriptAssist. It’s an elite list, and one that we’re honored to join.

Learn More
Ready to make your IT/InfoSec teams weep with joy (which is nothing like the weeping they did that time the intern wiped out the backup)?

If you’re a current AlertBot customer, then contact your Account Manager today.

If you haven’t yet experienced AlertBot, then start your free trial today. You’ll be setup in minutes. No billing information, nothing to install, and no hassle.

Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’re going to read about the future of the Macintosh while enjoying a cronut or two (or 5).

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.

The (Not-So-Magnificent) 7 HTTPS Errors that Infuriate Customers and Ruin Reputations

by Louis Kingston

In the classic flick The Magnificent Seven, a pack of essentially decent but “don’t you dare park your horse in my spot or else you’ll get your spurs blasted” gunslingers come together to rid a village of some nasty bandits. There’s action. There’s drama. There’s tragedy. There’s humor. There’s romance. There’s Steve freakin’ McQueen. What’s not to love?

Well, on the dusty and dangerous internet landscape, instead of a magnificent seven to save the day, there exists seven not-so-magnificent HTTPS errors that are impossible to like, let alone love. Why? Because their purpose is to block visitors from reaching websites — which leads to lost customers and wrecked reputations.

Here’s a look at the reprehensible HTTPS errors that have their picture on Most Wanted Lists in every post office from Tombstone to Dodge City:

403 Forbidden: The 403 Forbidden error means that the server is absolutely refusing — no ifs, ands or buts — to grant permission to access a resource, despite the fact that a request is valid. Common causes include missing index files, and incorrect .htaccess configuration.

404 Not Found: The 404 Not Found error means that a web page or other resource can’t be found because they simply don’t exist. Common reasons for this include a broken link, mistyped URL, or that someone moved or deleted a page and didn’t update the server (which happens a lot).

408 Request Time Out: The 408 Request Time Out error means that the server can’t find the target or resource that it’s searching for, and after a while, just throws in the towel. Often, this is because the server is overloaded.

410 Gone: Whereas (as noted above) a 404 error implies that there might be some hope — i.e. the target file might be somewhere, just not where it’s supposed to be — the 410 Gone error snuffs out any possible optimism. It’s totally, completely and permanently gone.

500 Internal Server Error: The 500 Internal Server Error means that the server cannot process a request for any number of reasons, such as missing packages, misconfiguration, and overload.

503 Service Unavailable: The 503 Service Unavailable error means that the server is either down because of maintenance, or because it’s overloaded. Either way, the server is conjuring up its inner Gandalf and screaming: “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!”

504 Gateway Time-Out: The 504 Gateway Time-Out error means that a higher-level upstream server isn’t working and playing well with a lower-level downstream server. After a while, the downstream server gets the message that it’s not wanted, and says “Oh yeah? Well, I don’t need you either!”

Calling in the Marshall
The bad news is that these reprehensible HTTPS errors, if left unchecked, can cause a lot of damage. Indeed, few things irk and offend website visitors more than seeing an error code. But the good news is that you can call in the Marshall— a.k.a. AlertBot — to restore law and order.

AlertBot constantly scans your site’s pages to watch out for these and other HTTP errors. If and when they are detected, authorized employees (e.g. webmasters, sysadmins, etc.) are proactively notified so they can take swift action and fix the problem.

It’s lightening fast, always reliable, and as smooth as Steve McQueen. Dastardly, good-fer-nuthin’ HTTPS errors don’t stand a chance!

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 German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

As technology continues to morph change with the times, the virtual reality experience keeps becoming more widespread and immersive. Two of the leading brands in the VR game are unmistakably VIVE (HTC) and Oculus. Both companies are leaders in the ever-expanding digital world of virtual reality, with both having released or having plans to release new headset models this summer.

While these brands may corner the market on connecting to the virtual realm, we wondered how they stack up when it comes to the world wide web and their own individual website performance.

To test their web performance quality, we used AlertBot’s external website monitoring system and its TrueBrowser™ technology to monitor both VIVE.com and Oculus.com from May 1^st through May 22, 2019. Given the high regard in which these companies are held because of their products, we expected their web performance to be strong.

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 VIVE’s and Oculus’s sites did perform quite well. Neither saw significant downtime, but each one experienced some sluggish speeds and even load time timeouts on a couple rare occasions.

VIVE.com experienced 99.91% uptime, with just a few errors recorded due to slow load times. None of these events lasted longer than a couple minutes, and none of them amounted to any significant downtime. Because of this, we still consider their performance to be quite solid.  (VIVE.com 8/10)

Oculus.com performed similarly with 99.98% uptime and similar slow page load errors that didn’t amount to significant downtime but at least put a minor hiccup in their performance. They experienced four times fewer of these errors than VIVE, so they ended up coming out just a tiny bit more on top. (Oculus.com 8.5/10)

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. We calculate the speed as an overall average across all locations during the time span selected for this Showdown.

The speed for both websites were also relatively close to each other. VIVE.com’s best speed, on average, was seen on Monday, May 13 at 3.2 seconds, which isn’t bad. Their best time of day, however, was on Tuesday, May 21 at 5am with 1.6 seconds. It’s definitely better, although it’s doubtful that they usually see a high number of traffic on a given morning. VIVE.com’s worst averaged day was Thursday, May 23^rd at just 5.1 seconds. However, their worst time was on Wednesday, May 22nd at 2pm with a much less admirable 8.8 seconds. The site’s overall average speed across the entire test period was 3.78 seconds.  (VIVE.com 8/10)

Oculus.com performed very similarly. Their best day on average was Thursday, May 2^nd with 3.7 seconds. Their best response time was at 9am on Wednesday, May 15 with 2.05 seconds. Oculus.com’s worst averaged day was also (like VIVE’s) Thursday, May 23^rd at just 4.37 seconds (although that’s slightly better than VIVE’s worst). However, their worst time of day was on Wednesday, May 1^st at 6am with 7.49 seconds (making their slowest time a full second faster than VIVE’s slowest). The site’s overall average speed across the entire test period was 3.96 seconds (Just a smidge slower than VIVE’s).     (Oculus.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. For this portion of the test, we compare the overall average speeds of each individual location captured during the selected period of time for this Showdown.

Previously, California had reigned supreme as the fastest state in the U.S. But lately, other states have been stepping up, dethroning The Golden State. This time, North Carolina wins (for both sites), with VIVE.com moving at a breezy 1.69 seconds in The Old North State. Oregon came in second at 1.8 seconds, with Arizona at 2 seconds. Comparatively, Washington state saw the slowest speed, coming in at a shameful 10.9 seconds, with Washington DC in second at 7.55 seconds and Texas in third at 7.43 seconds. (VIVE.com 8/10)

Oculus.com was also under two seconds with 1.9 seconds in North Carolina. Their second fastest was 2.2 seconds in Nevada and 2.3 seconds in Oregon. Overall, they were pretty close to VIVE. However, while Oculus saw a better overall “slowest” location, the second and third slowest were a little worse. Washington, DC came in at 8.66 seconds, then Washington state at 8.65 seconds, and Texas at 8.55 seconds. For the most part, though, the sites performed rather closely.  (Oculus.com 8/10)

Usability

For evaluating a site’s usability, we always 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 see if we can order their latest VR headset.

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.VIVE.com into our Chrome browser, it took 1 minute and 36 seconds (and a wealth of clicks) to come to the conclusion that you cannot order anything from their website (at least not easily, even though there’s a shopping cart icon on their menu bar), and that viewing a map to “Try VIVE Today” tells us that we have to live in Livingston, UK if we want to visit a store.

For www.Oculus.com, it took 3 clicks and 16 seconds to add the Oculus Quest 64 GB headset to our cart and be ready to checkout.

For these tests, we attempt to go into them without much prior knowledge of the site’s user side functionality to give it an unbiased test, so we’re pretty surprised at how drastically different the user experience was here. To give VIVE a fighting chance – even before trying Oculus’s site – we tried choosing a different headset in the event that maybe the most recent one isn’t available yet, and it still didn’t help. Perhaps the problem is that we’re performing the test from the US and VIVE’s parent company, HTC, appears to be UK-based. After further investigation, however, it appears that the only way to get to a purchasing option on VIVE’s site is to look at the “comparison” portion of the products page. Still, it seems odd that they wouldn’t make it easier and clearer to order their products. (Also, it appears that the webpage ends when you’re scrolling through, but it merely eventually changes the panel you’re “stopped” on as you scroll down, and then it moves you down the page to the next panel before stopping you again. It’s a neat design, perhaps, but no doubt a little confusing at first.)

With that in mind, here are the Usability scores:

(VIVE.com 5.5/10)
(Oculus.com 9/10)

Verdict

Both sites performed respectably, but when it comes to usability and speed, one unexpectedly outperformed the other—especially when it came to usability. So, we’re pleased to announce this Showdown champion to be…

Winner:

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:

Synthetic Monitoring for SaaS

Congratulations, you have just leveraged an awesome Software as a Solution (SaaS) service for your organization. Perhaps you have implemented a popular application – like Office 365, SalesForce or Dropbox – to support your staff and enhance collaboration between teams. Now you need to ensure that your employees and / or customers are happy too.

At this point, a common misconception often arises: the belief that a SaaS application relieves businesses of all responsibility for monitoring the application. It is just a matter of time before your business is rudely awakened to reality when customers start complaining about outages or poor performance on social media, and overloading the support desk with calls.

A negative customer experience when utilizing one of your SaaS applications can affect your bottom line. Unfortunately, you cannot totally rely on your provider to keep the system ticking; even the big guys experience outages and cyber attacks. Synthetic monitoring provides a solution, a way for you to keep your finger on the pulse of your cloud services.

Taking responsibility for SaaS applications

Effective SaaS monitoring is measured by how positive the end-user experience is. For instance, if a user cannot log in to an application to retrieve a file you sent them, they will not be happy. Can you leave it up to a SaaS provider to keep you up-to-date when they have a problem? No. In fact, it is not unusual for SaaS providers to delay making press statements when they experience problems or not announce them at all. Organizations are fast realizing the importance of taking the responsibility of proactively monitoring the performance of the SaaS applications they use themselves.

In addition, in 2016 Gartner predicted that by 2018 50 percent of enterprises with more than 1,000 users would use cloud products to monitor and manage their use of SaaS and other forms of public cloud. This reflects the growing recognition that, although clouds are usually stable, monitoring applications requires explicit effort on the part of the cloud customer.

Why do you need to monitor your SaaS applications yourself?

• Whatever your Service Level Agreement (SLA) says, if customers cannot access your application, they are more likely to call you than your service provider, so you need to know exactly how your service is doing, rather than wait for irate customers to notify you.
• Again, whatever your SLA says, if you are not monitoring your SaaS application, you cannot know the conditions of your SLA are actually being met.
• A SaaS provider gathers generic data about all of its customers that may not be explicitly relevant to you, or sufficient to generate a meaningful performance analysis and take advantage of all the benefits a synthetic monitoring solution can, as we shall see, provide.

Monitoring the customer experience (CX)

Synthetic monitoring has immense benefits for monitoring SaaS applications. It can help you keep a finger on the pulse of your SaaS application by addressing the following core issues that affect the customer experience and can affect your bottom line:

• Identified bottlenecks in the UX: Is your application functioning as predicted? How is it performing?
  When customer functions like logging in, using shopping carts or search fail, visitors may defect to one of your competitors. Synthetic transaction tests easily simulate these types of transactions, enabling you to be certain everything is working as it should and that recent software updates have not broken existing functionality. It is much easier to measure performance when you have a baseline. Synthetic monitoring applications, like AlertBot, have user-friendly portals that provide charts, graphs and reports to highlight deviations from the baseline. They make it that much easier to keep your finger on the pulse.
• Error sources and reporting: If there is a problem, where is it?
  Synthetic monitoring is a powerful predictive tool. According to one leading industry professional, “Synthetic monitoring doesn’t rely on complex predictive algorithms, it doesn’t take a data scientist with a Ph.D to interpret the results, and it doesn’t require additional spending on IT infrastructure. What it does is predict, to a fair degree of accuracy, how your application will perform in which geographies and isolate the root cause of any detected bottlenecks.”
• Downtime and outages: Is your application online and accessible?
  While synthetic monitoring is traditionally associated with customer-facing websites, it is platform-agnostic and works just as well monitoring SaaS applications. For instance, it can identify what is competing for resources on your network. Resource hogging applications can degrade the overall performance of your service.

5 top advantages of using synthetic monitoring for SaaS applications

1. Quickly assess the overall impact and performance of new features on your system
2. Monitor multiple cloud centers simultaneously as well as performance in scenarios where traffic is ramping up aggressively
3. Validate base-line performance prior to signing off on an SLA with your provider and objectively monitor it after
4. Utilize automatically generated diagnostics and reports that enable you to share information and collaborate with your SaaS provider
5. Determine if a cloud service is down and exactly who is affected in what geographical locations

Synthetic monitoring for SaaS is growing in leaps and bounds

According to a MarketsandMarkets.com report, “Synthetic Monitoring Market by Monitoring Type (paywall),” the enterprise synthetic application monitoring market size is expected to grow $919.2 million in 2016 to $2,109.7 million by 2021, at a CAGR of 18.1 percent from 2016 to 2021. The report predicts that “SaaS application monitoring is expected to gain maximum traction during the forecast period.” Don’t get left behind.

Conclusion

A 451 Research study found that the rapid growth of public cloud services and network virtualization has often outstripped management and monitoring capabilities, creating “blind spots” in network operations’ ability to maintain internal uptime and performance benchmarks. If you only recently climbed on the SaaS bandwagon, it is likely that your existing system monitoring tools are not cloud-friendly.

You may need some help from the experts to help you keep your finger on the pulse of your new SaaS application. Mosey along to AlertBot for more information about a holistic synthetic monitoring solution.

Key customer-features of AlertBot’s new website include responsive design, improved UX, intuitive navigation, new content and more.

March 27, 2017 – AlertBot, a leading provider of enterprise-class server and website monitoring solutions, announced today that it has launched a completely redesigned website at www.alertbot.com.

“As a leader in website performance monitoring, we know how important is to stay relevant and up-to-date with the latest technology and trends,” commented Pedro Pequeno, President of InfoGenius.com, Inc. which owns and operates AlertBot. “Our new website is the result of months of planning, development and testing. We are proud that it continues our tradition of quality and customer-focused updates that help make AlertBot so essential to our growing roster of customers worldwide.”

Key customer-focused features of AlertBot’s new and improved website include:

• Responsive design, which enables visitors to enjoy and access the website from any device: desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone.
• Engaging graphics, which provide visitors with a crisp, clear and uncluttered experience.
• An intuitive interface and ultra-fast loading speeds that help visitors easily and rapidly find the information they need.
• New product pages that provide a clear picture of AlertBot’s advanced platform.
• A new Blog that shares practical advice and insights.

Added Mr. Pequeno: “Since launching our new website, the feedback we have received from current and new customers has been incredibly positive. We look forward to enhancing and adding new features in the months ahead!”

About AlertBot

Founded in 2006, through its industry-leading TrueBrowser® solution AlertBot enables businesses to continuously monitor the availability and performance of their mission critical public Internet services from across the country and around the world. When AlertBot detects an issue with websites or servers, it analyzes the problem within seconds from multiple geographic locations, and delivers real-time alerts to business leaders and system administrators via devices such as smartphones and mobile devices. Thousands of companies trust AlertBot to help them deliver the uptime and performance they expect, and their customers demand. Learn more at www.AlertBot.com.

About InfoGenius.com, Inc.

Founded in 1999 by a group of engineers, InfoGenius prides itself in building and delivering quality enterprise-class services that help businesses, both small and large, realize their greatest potential online. InfoGenius conducts its business through its network of independently branded services including AlertBot, ELayer and UptimeSafe. Learn more at www.infogenius.com.

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!

Allentown, PA / September 21, 2016 / PR Newswire
InfoGenius.com, Inc., a software company and developer of the leading TrueBrowser®-based web application monitoring solution, AlertBot, is pleased to announce that they are now SAM certified and are looking to grow their relationships with Federal and State Governments. TrueBrowser® technology combines advanced performance tracking and error detection with real web browser testing to provide customers with best-in-class website monitoring solutions. Downtime of any length can be costly for any website or online business; AlertBot’s Website Monitoring Service uses TrueBrowser® technology to launch real web browsers and test websites inside those browsers, including mission-critical financial transactions conducted on government websites, login pages and other mission-critical pages. Learn More about Trusted Government Website Monitoring.

“With 85 Global Test Locations operating over 7 Internet Backbones developed during the past decade, AlertBot has established their reputation in real-world private industry applications; this level of website testing and monitoring is both proven and ready for Public Service Deployment as Federal and State Agencies rollout ‘Next Gen’ consumer style, interactive websites,” states Pedro Pequeno, President of InfoGenius.com, Inc. He continues: “We’re looking forward to showcasing AlertBot’s TrueBrowser® technology and capabilities to Governmental Agencies throughout the country and help them validate their client usage.”

AlertBot serves over 10,000 users spanning 6 continents worldwide with 200 million website checks per month. Their Synthetic Monitoring is designed to detect all possible application errors and collect important performance metrics as part of its monitoring routine. This data gives government organizations, including the U.S. Department of Energy, Virginia state government, NOAA, U.S. Marine Corps, and Smithsonian Institution, the information they need to ensure their applications are always running error-free and providing a quality user experience. AlertBot has registered to do business with Federal and State Agencies using the following registrations: DUNS: 624818493; CAGE: 6QP16; NAICS: 518210, 454111, & 334290.

About AlertBot:
Since launching in 2006, AlertBot has provided industry-leading TrueBrowser® web application monitoring. Thousands of companies trust AlertBot to continuously monitor their mission critical websites for errors and performance issues that affect user experience. Visit www.AlertBot.com for more information.

About InfoGenius.com, Inc.:
Founded in 1999 by a group of engineers, InfoGenius prides itself in building and delivering quality enterprise-class services that help businesses, both small and large, realize their greatest potential online. InfoGenius conducts its business through its network of independently branded services including AlertBot, ELayer and UptimeSafe. Visit www.infogenius.com for more information.

###

Running an AlertBot waterfall chart is just one example of something IT and website managers can do to see how the site is performing with load times. Before you release your site’s new design, complete overhaul or its grand debut, it’s wise to give your site a thorough testing first. A simple test with AlertBot’s waterfall chart can reveal images or third party code that might be clogging up your load time — or many other possible hang-ups. Your site might look fine and dandy, but if the page is taking too long to load in this fickle web-browsing age we’re living in, it could be very costly for your business.

(Above is a real, abbreviated example of AlertBot’s waterfall charts)

In the end, it’s really like a visit to the dentist; they often give you tips and guides on how to prevent cavities and other oral problems, while helping you maintain good oral hygiene. Maybe using mouthwash or flossing daily will help keep your gums healthy and your teeth strong. Likewise, with the right web performance tools and tests, you can ensure quality conversions and hopefully prevent any possible decay in your site’s performance.

See for yourself with AlertBot’s completely free 14 day trial!