A Quick Checklist To Ensure Site Uptime When Switching Web Hosts

There comes a time in every website's life when it must grow up and leave behind the infrastructure that got it to where it is. As traffic scales up, site uptime and speed become paramount; Web hosting companies are compared, and finally it is time to move house, i.e. to switch Web hosting companies. Moving sites without a glitch is important, even critical, and with some experimentation, I hit upon a checklist that should help anyone plotting a move. Follow these steps and your site will remain up throughout the move and your site visitors and online business teams will thank the IT department for its forethought.

1. Move When the Traffic is Low.
2. Switch Your Email Profile at Both Web Hosting Companies.
3. Create a Mirror Site and Monitor It.
4. Copy and Import Your Zone File.
5. Setup a Virtual Host at the Destination Server.
6. Start Your DNS Move.
7. Monitor the Move Using Website Performance Monitors.
8. Setup Availability Alerts to Fire If Content is Missing.
9. Conduct a Traceroute Test from All Over the World.
10. Tweet and Enlist Your Customers.

And that's all folks! You can read Keynote Recent Blog Post detailing these 10 steps to ensure that your website remains up and running during any change to its infrastructure. Follow them, and mimize or eliminate all downtime.

Related Links

Challenges of creating and managing robust applications 

Analyzing software applications and supporting infrastructures

Which Real Browser Do I Use to Monitor My Site’s Performance?

Which browser should I use to monitor my site’s performance? Should I test for all the most popular browsers? IE still has the majority of users in the market place—but shouldn’t I also test with Firefox?‖
Testing with a real IE browser is the most effective strategy because of the IE audience and because open web standards do not require you to conduct extensive testing using multiple real browsers – you gain the most by testing first using IE. Another reason to test with IE is that application developers often testing their applications using Firefox, only to have the application fail or not perform well when IE users begin to use it. Since most of the other browsers support the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) features and standards, testing for the most complex browser (IE) is recommended.

The two most widely used browsers are Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, with over two-thirds of the market worldwide—nearly 70% of site visitors use these two browsers.

Ask yourself the fundamental question, ―Which browser is our customer base using, and is our Web performance being monitored with that real browser or an imitation browser?

Related Links

1. Why Testing Web 2.0 Sites Requires Real Browser Measurements

2. Website Availability Monitoring 

3. Test Your Site on IE 9 and Measure User Experience  4. Mobile Browser Compatibility

A New Approach to Gathering User Experience Data

Keeping in mind the constraints about the group of users you plan to study and the kind of data you need to collect, the next challenge is selecting the right methodology.

The desire for large, unbiased, representative samples suggests using automated methods such as log file analysis. However, the need for rich, contextually sensitive session data suggests usability lab testing. Thus, there is a dilemma of quantity versus quality: log files generate a larger quantity of data, whereas usability labs generate much richer data. Furthermore, each of these methods can produce serious flaws in its area of strength when used inappropriately or inconsistently by different researchers. The solution is in the middle where the two ends of the spectrum meet.

New data collection methods can help usability researchers capture large amounts of user experience data while monitoring website. These solutions combine the best of both approaches with marginal sacrifices. The result is a more robust and standardized process to conduct consistent, reliable, actionable usability research.

Keynote WebEffective™ was developed to automate usability data collection and to strike the right balance between quantity of data collected and the quality of that data. As with other Keynote performance management solutions, WebEffective is deployed as a service using a network of servers positioned
between actual site visitors and Web site servers. for analysis. By redirecting visitors to your Web site through Keynote servers, WebEffective can maintain its position unobtrusively monitoring
and recording user interaction. WebEffective is able to see and capture all HTML content downloaded to the users’ computer as well as all the upstream data requests sent to the Web server. WebEffective then reconstructs the data streams into actual visitor sessions

Related Posts:

1. Monitoring User Experience of the Cloud  2. How to gain actionable data to demand better performance? 3. Website Availability Monitoring From End User's Perspective

The Audience is Watching: Website Availability

A large entertainment media site needed to measure availability, performance and quality of their multimedia streams to ensure their customers were receiving a satisfactory experience.

Streaming is pervasive on news, media and entertainment Web sites. To ensure the quality, reliability and availability of streaming media, Keynote offers the industry’s leading monitoring solution.

Keynote Streaming Perspective™  provides the true picture of your audio and video stream delivery from connect time to rebuffer events. It provides the most effective early warning system to help you resolve media stream performance and availability issues in real-time. 

Keynote Application Perspective™  provides cost-effective website availability monitoring, as well as root cause analysis and diagnostics. Both services use Keynote’s global test and measurement network to represent end-user experience from locations around the world. Together, Streaming Perspective and Application Perspective allow you ensure your systems and content are performing at their very best.

Related Links

1. Can your customer rely on your mobile site? 2. Test Your Site on IE 9 and Measure User Experience 3. Web site monitoring services