Uptrends blog

Google Analytics dominates the top 500

Google Analytics has only been available for about two years, but is already used by one third of the top 500 websites in the world.

We here at Pingdom use Google Analytics ourselves and were curious to see how many of the top web properties out there use it. We put the Alexa global top 500 websites under the microscope and found that 161 out of these 500 websites are using Google Analytics, which is 32.2%.

Google Analytics was released in November 2005, but the initial storm of signups forced Google to restrict signups until August of 2006, when the service was made generally available.. [More]

Website monitoring services It's 3 a.m. Do you know how your website is behaving? If you run an online business of any kind, you should, because downtime and poor website performance not only causes lost revenue, it also can lead to a loss of reputation and loyalty. Fortunately, keeping tabs on your website 24/7 is an easy task thanks to services that automate the process of monitoring your website around the clock. If your website goes down or slows to a crawl, these services will automatically notify you using a variety of methods such as email, pager and SMS. Many of these services enable you to monitor specific services/protocols (i.e. web, email, etc.) as well as custom scripts on your website. Some even permit the configuration of advanced alert criteria and provide for escalation procedures that alert different people if the website remains down after initial alerts. Here are 4 popular monitoring services:. [More]

Double-Take announced the availability of its Virtual Recovery Assistant, a new enhancement to Double-Take for Windows that simplifies the process of migrating to VMware ESX virtual machines by automating the provisioning of the virtual environment and reducing end-user downtime associated with traditional physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration products. The new feature can also be used to automate the protection of workloads running on physical servers, moving them to virtual machines automatically in the event of a server outage or site-wide disaster.

“By leveraging server virtualization, IT organizations have realized they’re able to address previously unmet needs, such as cost-effective remote disaster recovery,” stated Lauren Whitehouse, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Performing P2V- or V2V-based replication with Double-Take and the new Virtual Recovery Assistant can deliver significant improvements over tape-based recoveries, especially lowering recovery time objectives.”. [More]

Web site consistency improved among major web retailers in May with 27 merchants achieving a consistency rating of “excellent,” according to Gomez Inc. The top 50 retail web sites had an average site availability rate of 98.07%.

In May, 16 retailers received a rating of “good,” six got “fair” and one received “poor.”

The consistency ratings take into account differences in the speed of web page delivery across multiple visits and the frequency a retail site is unavailable because of downtime. The variability of response time and the number of minutes out are combined to create each retailer’s consistency rating, Gomez explains. . [More]