AlertBot: How did you get into robotics?

Matthew Vasquez: In the early 2000’s, when me and my brother were little kids, my Dad saw [BattleBots] on TV, and at that time, wasn’t even an engineer or anything like that, he was just kind of a hobbyist – good with tools – and he decided he wanted to try it. So, me and my brother were exposed to it from a super early age, and we loved it then and we still love it now.

Jason Vasquez: My family introduced me to robotics as a concept, and brought me to my first event, called RoboGames. And in that event, my first time I bought a one-pound robot that was a kit, and I learned a lot from it and obviously gave me the need to keep doing robotics. Through that event, we were able to prep ourselves for BattleBots. So, once BattleBots came back on the air, we were in a good position to apply and get our foot in the door, and it’s been great ever since.

AlertBot: How did you get started in BattleBots?

Matthew: Me and my brother really got started on the TV show BattleBots in 2015 when the show got rebooted on ABC, and then eventually switched over to the Discovery Channel. But around that time, when combat robotics wasn’t really on TV, we were just doing smaller combat robot events in Southern California, sometimes traveling to Northern California, and occasionally other states. When we saw the show was coming back to TV, it was so exciting and [we] wanted to apply. We wanted to get on the show and kind of live up to our childhood heroes. In 2015, we barely made the cut for the TV show and ever since then, we’ve been competing and it’s been a pretty life-changing experience!

AlertBot: Do you plan on staying involved with BattleBots?

Matthew:  I think, as long as BattleBots is going, we want to be part of it in some way. We love competing. We love building. I love driving. I love the repair work. I pretty much love all of it! So, I think as long as BattleBots is around, we’re going to try our very best to be a part of it.

Jason: Yeah, whatever that may mean, I’d like to be involved in one way or another. It’s been great being on Whiplash and it’s been great having my own team. It’s a really great community and I’d like to stay involved in one way or another.

AlertBot: How did you come up with the name ‘Whiplash’?

Matthew: To this day, we’re not 100% sure. I was pretty convinced that I came up with it. There was another very unknown smaller robot named “Whiplash;” I really liked the robot, really liked the name, and I just kind of ended up using it for a different event that was not BattleBots, and then it kinda got carried into BattleBots. But we have other team members who are not convinced that it was me who came up with it…

Debbie Vasquez: Yeah, no, it was me. *laughter* It was me. I remember when I came up with it! I remember thinking I really liked “Backlash” back in the day in Comedy Central BattleBots days. And I was thinking “’Backlash.’ Alright, what else can we name it kind of like that?” And I was like, *Gasps* “Whiplash!” But… some people think otherwise.

Matthew: Yeah… *shaking his head* That’s not true. *Debbie laughs* But, whatever, it’s fine. We’ll never know!

Jason: Well, when people first asked us that, we’d like to joke around and say “Because Whiplash wins!” We chose that name [because] it’s a great name, I like it, and it’s been good ever since we chose it!

AlertBot: Is BattleBots a full-time job?

Matthew: Believe it or not, BattleBots is not a full-time job. Pretty much every competitor either works an engineering job, or some other job, or is a student, but BattleBots is not a profession. We go to our jobs for 8 hours a day, come home, work another 8 hours on our BattleBots and rinse, repeat when BattleBots season comes.

Jason: Well, during the two-plus weeks of filming, it is a full-time job, and up until the event with prepping and getting the robot ready, it certainly feels like it. We usually do it on top of school and our actual jobs, too. It’s a lot of time, but we just make the time for it and make it happen.

AlertBot: What do you do in the off season?

Matthew:  I have other hobbies: I play tennis, play guitar and bass. My brother does a lot of mountain biking. But in the off season, there are also plenty of other combat robot tournaments going on. There are lots of local ones. Sometimes we travel out of state to go to different ones, but combat robotics is really an all-year-round sport. But it’s that few months a year where BattleBots really takes over our lives.

Jason: I used to be really big into biking, but right now I’m focusing on school and work and, honestly, other types of robotics. I’m really trying to expand my horizons and just continue learning about robotics. It’s great!

Thank you, AlertBot!

Watch the full interview on our YouTube channel below!

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.

A Closer Look at AlertBot’s Alert Group Feature

If we start by sharing that AlertBot’s alert group feature lets you, well, alert certain groups, then you might wonder what earth-shattering revelations we have in store — such as water is wet, fire is hot, and the pain of Game of Throne’s final season will never, ever go away (seriously, whatever happened to Gendry?!).

Yes, you’re right: the alert group feature IS about alerting groups of people about a site failure — but as George R.R. Martin would say: there is much more to the story! Here’s a rundown of some interesting details that you may not be aware of:

Notes

When you set up an alert group, you can add notes if you feel that it would benefit your team. For example, you can let your Web Team know who the communication point person during a failure event should be or if it should include several people from the team, provide updates about vacation schedules, and anything else that you deem relevant.

Notification Order

You can choose when members of an alert group are notified of a site failure, from immediately all the way up to 48 hours later. For example, your Web Team can be alerted right away during a site failure event, and your CTO can be alerted 1 hour later into a site failure event and so on (if the problem persists). You can choose the frequency of alerting and how many times individuals or a group of people can be alerted during downtime events on your site.

Contact Method

You can also choose which email address will be contacted, based on the notification order. For example, an immediate alert can be sent to [email protected] and other teams/emails if selected, and then an hour later another alert can be sent to [email protected] and so on until the site is back up and running.

Monitors

What happens if you’re doing some testing or updating, and you don’t want failure events across all site monitors to trigger an alert (and maybe spark some anxiety)? No problem: you can choose which specific monitors are associated with an alert group.

But don’t worry: if you have a whole bunch of monitors and want to include them all, then you don’t have to manually add each one to an alert group. Simply select “All monitors in the account” and you’re good to go!

Do You Have 30 Seconds?

We’ve saved the best part for last: setting up a new alert group doesn’t take hours, or even minutes — it takes seconds. Simply choose the options you need, and you’re all set. And changing an alert group’s settings is just as fast (maybe even faster).

Try AlertBot Now

Reading is fun. But experiencing is better (unless you happen to be reading Game of Thrones and are perfectly happy learning about White Walkers vs. hanging out with them). Put AlertBot to the test by launching your free trial today. Play around with alert groups, along with many other features and functions.

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

The year was 1995. Michael Jordan returned to the NBA. Amazon sold its first book. Windows 95 unleashed the era of taskbars, long filenames, and the recycle bin. And when people weren???t dancing the Macarena, they were flocking to see Apollo 13 and hear Tom Hanks utter the phrase that would launch millions of (mostly annoying) impersonations: ???Houston, we have a problem.???

Thankfully, the eggheads in space and the eggheads on the ground worked tirelessly (and apparently smoked a whole lot of cigarettes) to get the crew home. But it was the pivotal moment when the failure was first reported that triggered the spectacular problem-solving process. If it happened an hour ??? or maybe even a few minutes ??? later, then the outcome could have been tragic instead of triumphant.

Admittedly, the brave, intrepid professionals in charge of keeping their organization???s website online and functional DON???T have to deal with life-and-death scenarios. But they DO need to deal with problems that, if left unsolved, will significantly damage competitive advantage, brand reputation and sales (immediately if we???re talking e-commerce, and eventually if we aren???t). And that???s where AlertBot???s failure alerting feature enters the picture.

What is Failure Alerting?

Failure alerting is when designated individuals ??? such as a SysAdmin, CTO, CIO, CEO, and so on ??? are proactively notified when something goes wrong with a website, such as downtime, errors, slowness, or unresponsive behavior.

As a result, just like in Apollo 13, the right people can take swift, intelligent action to fix things before visitors/customers sound the alarm bell, or worse, head out the (virtual) door and go straight to a competitor without looking back.

Notification Methods

AlertBot customers can choose any or all of the following methods to notify team members of a website failure event:

• Email
• Text Message
• Phone Call

For example, a SysAdmin could receive an email, a text message, and a phone call the moment something goes wrong.

Automatic Escalation

Now, if we were in NASA Mission Control circa 1970, someone wearing really thick horned-rimmed glasses would rise above the cigarette smoke and ask: What happens if the SysAdmin doesn???t receive the email, text message, and phone call? It???s a good question, and there is an even better answer: don???t worry about it.

AlertBot???s failure reporting feature can be configured to escalate the website failure warning if certain individuals don???t respond within a specific timeframe. For example, if a SysAdmin is indisposed for any reason (driving, sleeping, etc.), then after two minutes the alert can be pushed to another designated team member such as the CTO. And if the CTO doesn???t respond within two minutes, then the alert can be pushed to the CIO, and so on.

Ideally, the individual (or multiple individuals) who are sent the first alert receive it immediately, and take rapid action. But if they don???t or can???t, then the alert is escalated accordingly. It is important to note that all of this happens automatically, so there is no possibility of human error.

Granted, none of this is as entertaining as watching Apollo 13. There???s no rousing soundtrack or Tom Hanks. Heck, there???s not even Kevin Bacon.

But when it comes to fixing website problems as quickly as possible, organizations know that the less drama, the better. That???s precisely what AlertBot???s multi-channel, auto-escalating failure reporting feature delivers. We don???t need an Oscar. We just need extremely satisfied customers ??? and we have a lot of those.

Next Up: Reviewing Failure Events Online

??In our next blog, we???ll explore reviewing failure events online to pinpoint issues and detect problems. Stay tuned!

Launch a free trial??of AlertBot???s acclaimed site uptime monitoring solution. No credit card. Nothing to download. Get started in minutes. And if you decide to purchase our solution, there are NO setup fees!

Sometimes it just makes too much sense. When the opportunity arose for AlertBot to sponsor one of the highly talented teams in the BattleBots tournament, it just seemed like a no-brainer. (I mean, come on — we’re AlertBOT… it’s a match made in robotic heaven!) In this case, we were able to be among the select sponsors for team Whiplash, a much-celebrated family-run team that regularly competes in BattleBots. As part of the sponsorship, the Whiplash gang invited us to witness the filming of the latest BattleBots season in Las Vegas, Nevada, and it didn’t take much convincing for us to start booking our trip to Sin City.

A pair of us from the AlertBot team flew out to Vegas to meet the Vasquez family – AKA collectively known as Whiplash – on Monday, October 17th, 2022, to get a personal tour of the facilities. We met with Whiplash’s Debbie Vasquez (Whiplash Team Manager), who graciously showed us around the BattleBots pit area, and was an absolute delight to talk to. She even introduced us to other teams that we could speak with and see their bots prior to the fights. We met with teams that traveled as far as Australia (DeathRoll) to be here for the filming of the show. We enjoyed meeting the entire Whiplash team, which included Matthew Vasquez (Whiplash Team Captain, Designer, Builder and Driver), Jason Vasquez (Whiplash Builder, Auxiliary Weapons Operator, Pit Crew ), Jeff Vasquez (Whiplash Team Builder, Pit Crew), Debbie Vasquez (Whiplash Team Manager) and others on their team. They were all just like you see them on TV and a pleasure to be around.

2021 marked the first year that a new BattleBots arena building was set up to be a permanent hub for BattleBots tournaments. Next to the main arena building is a small collection of tents for various specialties dedicated to the needs of the BattleBots teams. Right alongside the arena is a designated welding area, where Lincoln Electric is set up to assist the teams in working on — or fixing — their respective bots. On the other side of these small tents is the main pit area tent, where one would find every single team set up inside with individual workstations for each team. It looked very much like a tradeshow with tables promoting the teams or selling merch. However, these are quite literally stations where the teams feverishly work on their bots — whether setting them up for their first fight or rebuilding them after a particularly violent encounter. Each team’s work area was also graced with a widescreen TV so they could watch the fights live while working, keeping the builders in the loop as to the progress of the new season. The hope and excitement in that pit area on the eve of the first day of filming the new season was palpable. Sadly, while each match would result in a winner, there must also be a loser.

We were amazed by the goodwill between the teams, too. You might expect there to be a cutthroat competitive nature between them, but instead, there was a shocking amount of love and admiration shared among the teams. By the way they behaved, you would think they were all on the same team together. It was hard to imagine these teams remaining friends after one might totally debilitate or demolish the bot of another. But somehow, they do. Still, it was impossible not to notice the passion, detail, and effort that went into each bot. Each team had immense hope of success with their bots, and you almost couldn’t imagine their hard work resulting in utter heartbreak.

The following day, we arrived early to make it through the front gate check-in area and join the VIP’s in finding a place to sit inside the arena in the audience on the bleachers. Each taping session is 4 hours long, and each day includes 2 of these recording sessions, with a 2-hour break between them. Fans can buy tickets to any of these sessions (pending ticket availability, of course) online, so they could attend one of these sessions, or both if they desired. We attended both the morning and the afternoon sessions that first day, with a set number of fights occurring in each session and extras squeezed in if possible.

Fans were expected to be very impassioned and involved in each taping session and were often instructed to cheer at specific times. Granted, you don’t have to tell these fans to be excited; they just naturally were. But for taping reasons, there needed to be specific moments of cheering and reactions from the fans to make the event appear smooth for the episodes that would air.

Everyone you’d expect to be in attendance at a BattleBots taping was indeed there. Announcers Chris Rose and Kenny Florian were there to offer their pre- and post-fight announcer commentary, and Faruq Tauheed was there to announce each fight (or, in some cases, re-announce the fight, if he or the producers needed a different take from him). The judges, who would clarify any close-call fights were also on the other side of the arena cage, and we’d learn of their final verdict when Faruq made his official announcement.

For the audience, comedian Bill Dwyer, who was the host of the show during its first iteration in 2000 and 2001, played hype man to the audience, and was just a lot of fun. He interacted with us on a personal level, as well as getting the younger fans engaged (and often rewarding them with free t-shirts and such). He would fill in the downtime between fights, which helped some of the slower moments pass by more quickly.

Members of the individual bot teams also would frequently run over to the stands and hand out signs or stickers to fans to enjoy or hold up during their fight to cheer them on. It was a neat little bonus for being there in person.

A given fight would start with Faruq’s announcement, the teams walking out (and posing), and their bots being wheeled into the arena “battlebox” on hydraulic carts. After setup, the countdown would begin, and the bots would go at each other for the win. Each fight is given 3 minutes total to play out, which were easily the most exciting minutes of the day, but some fights didn’t last even half that time. A fight would end early if one bot rendered the other undriveable, but other fights would last the full three minutes and then go to the judges to make the final call as to who the winner would be. In most of those cases, the winner would still be chosen “unanimously” across all the judges.

The fights were all pretty exciting. One match ended after about 20 or 30 seconds with a super quick KO, while a couple others needed the full time to complete. One particular fight ended with a bot catching on fire and it would take some time for the arena to be cleared and readied up for the next fight. In the second session, a pair of bots got stuck together after less than 30 seconds of fighting, and after quite some time trying to get them apart, they were cut apart and taken out of the arena for the next fight to commence. There was definitely no shortage of memorable moments during a full day of filming!

When we left Vegas for home, we took along with us a new appreciation for BattleBots and their talented teams. It’s a sport that appreciates its fans and has a surprising amount of heart on and off camera (especially off camera). We only witnessed a handful of the fights that will be televised next year, but you can be sure we’ll be tuning in to watch these teams go head-to-head for the championship! Fans can tune in on Thursday’s at 8pm (check your local listings) to see the new season of BattleBots on The Discovery Channel. Go, Whiplash!

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).

While on the Run Wild 5K/10K trail, we ran through the Trexler Game Preserve, an 1100 acre animal sanctuary. The race finished inside the Lehigh Valley Zoo, which led everyone past its animal exhibits, including camels, zebras, and kangaroos. A few of us even stuck around after the race to mingle a bit with the zoo’s various furry residents.

The AlertBot team is excited to be able contribute to such a noble cause as Animal Conservation, especially with thousands of species remaining endangered today. All proceeds from the race went to benefit Lehigh Valley Zoo’s animal conservation efforts, which raised over $25,000 last year and nearly doubled that this year, raising $40,000.

Run Wild was a success, and we can’t wait for the next opportunity to strap on our sneakers and join in the efforts to make a difference in our community!

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:

It’s that time of year again, where sales conscious bargain chasers brave the throngs of other sale hunters in the frigid November early morning air on that most dreaded of retail shopping days: BLACK FRIDAY. Just hours earlier, many of these same credit-card-wielding warriors were huddled around a table with family, giving thanks once again while stuffing themselves to their waistline’s discontent with mashed potatoes, roasted turkey and homemade pie. The juxtaposition of these two contradicting practices is staggering, but it’s no less the holiday tradition year after year.

As we approach another Christmas holiday, the world of ecommerce continues to ramp up the way they approach Black Friday–and its younger electronic sibling, Cyber Monday–with many now starting their sales right after Halloween. Accordingly, we decided to do something special for our next Website Showdown: a Black Friday / Cyber Monday edition that pits the ecommerce colossus Amazon against the websites for brick-and-mortar retail mega-stores Walmart and Target. It’s a truly epic battle royale to see how each site performs during the biggest shopping days of the year.

So, as usual, we used AlertBot’s external website monitoring system and its TrueBrowser™ technology to monitor all three sites from Thanksgiving through Black Friday and Cyber Monday, spanning from November 23, 2017 to November 27, 2017. We expected strong, reliable performance during the entire run and we were not disappointed. The results were nothing short of impressive.

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.

Usually for this section, we evaluate each site’s performance in detail, drilling down to specific errors each one faced, and the different types of errors we usually see (like Slow Page Files, Timeouts, etc). It’s unusual for the sites in a two-site Showdown to not return a single error, much less a three-site Showdown. In this special evaluation of three sites, not one single, solitary error was found between them. All three sites avoided any kind of failure event or significant error. With the stakes so high for three of the biggest retailers on the most significant sale days of the year, one would expect nothing less. So, with that said, each site earns a perfect score for Reliability.

(Amazon 10/10)
(Walmart 10/10)
(Target 10/10)

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.

Sites like Amazon, Walmart and Target boast very graphics-driven designs, and especially with monstrous sale event days like these, the graphics are often big, bold, and frequently changing.

With that said, of Amazon.com’s 5-day run, they saw the fastest day, on average, to be Sunday, November 26^th with 4.3 seconds. It’s not the slickest speed a site can have, but it’s certainly not bad. On their slowest day, on average, Amazon still clocked in at 5 seconds on Cyber Monday, which is still not too shabby. When looking at specific times of day for performance, the best hour was at 5AM on Sunday with an impressive 3.4 seconds, while Cyber Monday also saw the slowest hour at 7AM with 6.7 seconds.
(Amazon 9/10)

Walmart.com held their own surprisingly well during this time, too. Their best average day was Thanksgiving Day, November 23^rd at 4.2 seconds, just barely edging ahead of Amazon. Their worst day on average was Saturday, November 25^th, also at 5 seconds. Finally, their best hour on average was on Thanksgiving at a remarkable 2.7 seconds at 5PM. Their worst time on average was 6.4 seconds at 2AM on Sunday, November 26.
(Walmart 9.5/10)

Last, but certainly not least, Target.com didn’t perform quite as well as the other two, but they still performed respectably, especially considering the fact their site avoided any failure events. Their best day for speed, on average, was Thanksgiving Day at 5.2 seconds, which is worse than both Amazon and Walmart’s worst days. Target’s slowest day on average was Sunday, November 26 at 5.4 seconds, which at the very least, shows a great consistency for the performance of the retail chain’s online presence. Their fastest hour turned out to be on Black Friday at 9AM with 3.9 seconds, with their slowest being on Cyber Monday at 4AM with 7.6 seconds.
(Target 8.5/10)

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.

California tends to prove to see the fastest web transaction speeds in the country, and in this test scenario, they once again come out on top for each website. For Amazon.com, the titan of ecommerce saw average load times of 2 seconds in the The Golden State, with their next-fastest location being Texas at 3.2 seconds. When it came to their slowest locations, Illinois came in at the bottom with 6.6 seconds, with Georgia just above them with 6.3 seconds.
(Amazon 9/10)

Walmart.com was only a millisecond faster, seeing an average load time of 1.9 seconds in California, also coming in faster in Texas at 2.7 seconds. But Walmart saw a placement swap for which state was the slowest, with Georgia coming in at the bottom at 6.6 seconds and Illinois right above them at 6.5 seconds.
(Walmart 9.5/10)

Target loaded on average at 2.7 seconds in California, with Texas coming in next at 3.5 seconds. Again, Target’s fastest speeds proved to be slower than their competitors. The slowest average speed that Target saw in the U.S. was also Georgia, at 7.2 seconds, but Washington stepped in as their second slowest, at 7 seconds flat.
(Target 8.5/10)

Usability

For usability, we always select a common task a user might typically try to accomplish when visiting the sites we’re testing and replicate it. For our previous Showdowns, we tested things like visiting a site for nutritional information or going through the motions of ordering movie tickets from a local theater. Like with the most recent Showdown for Lowes and Home Depot, we decided to see what the experience would be like to use these three different websites to add a common product to the shopping cart.

For each of these processes, let’s see about adding the PS4 version of new video game Star Wars: Battlefront II to our shopping cart. To begin each process, we started by opening a new tab in Google Chrome and typing in the site’s URL.

From the point of typing www.amazon.com into our Chrome browser, typing “Star Wars Battlefront 2” into the store’s search box and adding it to the cart, it took 30 seconds. From the front page, it took about 5 clicks (including selecting the autocomplete suggestion in the search bar) to get to the final “Place Order” window.

From the point of typing www.walmart.com into our Chrome browser, it took about 4 clicks and 35 seconds to get to the Cart Checkout window. The autocomplete was a little clumsy to deal with (it was tough to tell if the browser was really proceeding to load the site), but overall, it was a decent experience.

From the point of typing www.target.com into our Chrome browser, it took about 5 clicks and 27 seconds to get to the Cart Checkout window.

All three sites were good experiences, although each one has a very different feel. It’s a tough call to say which user experience we found to be better, so we decided to try a second test. This time, we chose something different, like Wonder Woman on Blu-Ray. We also decided to try Mozilla Firefox this time.

The process of finding the Blu-Ray disc and getting to the checkout process on Amazon took about 4 clicks and 25 seconds. The process on Walmart.com took 26 seconds and 5 clicks. On Target.com, it took roughly 24 seconds and 4 clicks. This time, we noticed that in the search results, there’s a convenient “Add to cart” option next to the items on Target’s site that Walmart and Amazon both DON’T have. This definitely gives Target a slight edge over their competitors. And with that being the only real significant difference, outside of its slightly faster completion time, we’ll have to say Target wins the Usability portion of this Showdown.

(Amazon 9.5/10)
(Walmart 9.5/10)
(Target 10/10)

Verdict

With stakes this high, you would only expect the best from the leaders in the retail industry, so it comes as no surprise that the results were so good and so close. This may be the toughest Showdown we’ve had to score yet, especially with three hats in the ring this time around.

But, with all things accounted for – reliability, speed, geographical performance, and the site’s usability – we’ve reached our verdict:

WINNER:

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!

If website performance is important to you, then you’ll know just how vital it is to the success of your business’s website. To AlertBot, web performance is everything. This topic is of great interest to us, as we live and breathe web performance on a daily basis. It got us thinking – we all love a good head-to-head, mano-a-mano rivalry: Tyson vs Holyfield. The Hatfields vs The McCoys. The Jets vs The Sharks. Prego vs Ragu. Luke vs Vader. So we thought, what if we tracked the performance of two websites within a certain genre and pit them against each other. Who has the better website performance? Who will come out on top?

Every Fall, Apple releases a new iPhone like clockwork. But Apple isn’t the only game in town. With Apple celebrating the recent release of the iPhone 7, Samsung has their Galaxy S7 (which released in March). So we decided it was fitting to have Apple.com go toe-to-toe with Samsung.com. The results were not unexpected. (Well… most of the results.)

When you have companies as serious about their products and innovation as these two, you’d expect their websites to perform impeccably. And, honestly, they did.

We tracked the sites and examined three weeks in September – the 1^st through the 22^nd – to see how these sites performed.  During this timeframe, we tested the websites around the clock from 17 different locations across the United States using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser Monitoring.  The tests were performed by loading their homepages inside real Firefox browsers and giving them a maximum of 7 seconds to render and become fully interactive.  Anything beyond 7 seconds (which is well above the average expected page load time) was considered a failure.  After compiling all the data, this is what we found:

Reliability

When we examine the reliability of a website, we’re looking for failure events – like when pages don’t fully load or go down completely – and try to identify the cause of the failure. Some common causes are slow third-party code used on pages, incomplete page content, actual web server failures, etc.

For Samsung, their website experienced no failure events during our test period, and achieved 100% uptime. This is definitely above the norm for website performance, but not unexpected for a company like Samsung.  We would have loved to find some juicy failure-generated data to talk about, but Samsung’s website was as clean as a whistle on this front. (Samsung Score 10/10)

Similarly, Apple.com experienced no failure events and achieved 100% uptime. While I’d expect nothing less from a juggernaut like Apple, it’s still impressive when you consider other retailers that experience frequent website issues. (Apple Score 10/10)

Speed

When we evaluate a website’s speed, we’re looking at the time it takes the site’s homepage to render and load to the point of being fully interactive.  We run these tests inside real Firefox web browsers using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser ™ monitoring.

While evaluating the speed of the websites specifically, Samsung.com’s fastest day was Friday, Sept. 2^nd, with its slowest day being Saturday, Sept. 3^rd. On average, the site’s homepage took  around 1.7 seconds to load. That’s not bad at all! Some recent studies have shown that the expected load time for sites in ecommerce to be 2 seconds or less, so Samsung definitely fits the bill here. Some online studies have determined that if an ecommerce site is making $100,000 per day in sales, just a 1-second page delay could potentially cost the company $2.5 million in lost sales per year.  (Ouch!) On its slowest day (Sept 3^rd), Samsung.com saw some load times in the range of over 7 seconds at times during the day.     (Samsung Score 9/10)

While evaluating Apple.com’s speed, its fastest day was also a Friday, on Sept. 9^th, with its slowest day being a Friday, Sept. 2 (coincidentally, the same day Samsung experienced its fastest load time), in which the site took 10 seconds to load at times (due to a slow page file error). However, on average, the site’s homepage took  around 1.3 seconds to load. It’s a hair faster than Samsung’s, but they’re close to each other.    (Apple Score 9/10)

One major mistake a lot of websites make is utilizing large graphic file sizes or third party code on their home page, and it’s things like that that can really bog down a website’s speed. It’s not surprising that both Apple and Samsung avoid this mistake. While both of them display large, beautiful images on their front page, they optimize their file sizes well.

Geographic

When we looked at Samsung.com’s performance at various locations around the United States, we found that the site consistently took longer to load in Texas, with its slowest time occurring in Washington, DC, but was the fastest in Florida, North Carolina and Georgia. Samsung.com had just a handful of minor site hiccups during this three-week period, but only at specific locations. For example, AlertBot registered 5 instances of slower load times: once in New York, twice in Florida, once in Washington DC and once in Washington state. Still, it managed to perform more than adequately at these locations overall.  It wouldn’t be uncommon for websites to experience significant trouble in certain areas of the country on a regular basis, but we expect only the best from Samsung.   (Samsung Score 9/10)

When we looked at Apple.com’s website performance from various locations around the U.S, we found that the site consistently took the longest to load in Utah and Texas, but was the fastest in Florida and North Carolina. It’s intriguing to note that both Florida and North Carolina saw the best load times for both websites, while Texas was one of the slowest for both.  AlertBot did catch two instances of slower load times and a slow javascript file in Illinois, but neither problem caused the site to go completely down.   (Apple Score 9/10)

Usability

For usability, we select a common task that a typical user might want to perform on sites like these. Then, using hands-on testing, we perform the same task on each website while timing how long it takes to complete and how many mouse clicks it takes to get the job done.  This time, we decided to approach each site with the intention of purchasing their latest phone.  We timed how long it would take from the point of entering the URL into the browser on through to getting the phone into the online shopping cart.

From the point of typing in “Apple.com” and clicking through their site from the phone product pages all the way to the shopping cart, it took 45 seconds (and 7 clicks of the mouse) for us to add a SIM-free 256GB “jet black” iPhone 7 to the online “shopping bag.” (There’s an additional click, however, to view the cart when you’re done adding the phone to it.)

From typing “Samsung.com” into our browser and clicking through to add a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge 32GB “unlocked” phone into our shopping cart and viewing the virtual bag, it took a shocking 1 minute and 30 seconds (in 5 mouse clicks)! We used Google Chrome as our browser for both websites and the Samsung site froze up twice during the process (in fact, we accidentally added TWO of the same phone to our cart because we were trying to click through to the cart and it was unresponsive). Just to be fair, we tried it again, and it hung up yet again during the ordering process, but this time it was a little under a minute to get to the shopping bag. All of this happened on Chrome’s latest version, too. We know web browsers can be super fickle, though, so we decided to try it a third time, this time with Mozilla Firefox, and it took 20 seconds to get the same phone into the shopping cart. On Apple’s site, for the iPhone, there are a lot more choices – from storage space to phone color – to choose from, so it makes sense as to why that process might take longer. But it is rather alarming that Samsung’s site experienced THAT much trouble while just trying to add their phone to the shopping cart.

Just to compare via Firefox, then, we re-performed the timed test for Apple.com. One could argue that re-tests don’t account for newfound familiarity with either site, but it took 25 second to add the same iPhone 7 to the shopping cart. While that’s a few seconds slower than Samsung, we also didn’t experience any problems on either browser with Apple’s site.

All things considered, here are the Usability scores:

(Samsung Score 7/10)          (Apple Score 9/10)

Final Verdict

The performance of both sites were very, very good and quite close to one another. Apple’s site just barely edged out Samsung’s on speed and geographic performance, while both matched each other on reliability. Despite their slight differences, they both performed at the top of their game in online performance. However, after factoring in our usability testing, where Apple’s site performed much more consistently, the winner for the very first AlertBot Showdown is clear:

WINNER:

Allentown, PA / April 11, 2016 / PR Newswire
InfoGenius.com, Inc., a software company and developer of the leading real-time web application monitoring solution, AlertBot, celebrates a decade of website and server monitoring. Downtime of any length can be costly for any website or online retailer; AlertBot’s Website Monitoring Service provides best-in-class site monitoring using its TrueBrowser® technology to launch real web browsers and test websites inside those browsers, including mission-critical financial transactions conducted on e-commerce-driven websites, login pages and other mission-critical pages. AlertBot serves over 10,000 users with 200 million website checks per month using its network of over 100 locations, spanning 6 continents worldwide.

“AlertBot measures every facet of a website to help our clients improve the user experience; our testing helps clients make adjustments that result in measurable gains – for instance, a major e-commerce player measured gains of $1.4 million for every second of response time their platform improved – that small improvement netted them $18 million in revenue!” states Pedro Pequeno, President of InfoGenius.com, Inc. He continues: “Over the past 10-years, AlertBot has been deployed and proven in countless real-world applications by some of the leading names in the e-commerce space.”

AlertBot’s Synthetic Monitoring is designed to detect all possible application errors and collect important performance metrics as part of its monitoring routine. This data gives businesses including Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Chrysler, Mutual of Omaha, Sony, Microsoft & Dell Computing the information they need to ensure their applications are always running error-free and providing a quality user experience.

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.

If you’re not quite sure what that is, third party code is usually any code provided by another company or website to plug in / embed a service on your website. For example, you may have a web stats tracking code, a banner ad rotator, or a couple lines of code that drops your Twitter or Instagram feed onto your website. These pieces of code are considered third party code since they’re provided by another source.

Some of the problems that this kind of code can cause may be:

• Slow page load times
• SSL errors (there could be a non-secure component in the code)
• Unexpected javascript errors of various kinds
• Failure to load some of your website content
• Inaccurate stats tracking

The case of causing inaccurate stats is a particularly interesting one that most people don’t consider. Problems with third party code could render your website’s stats unreliable if the stats code is not fully loading. When this happens, you may only be getting partial information about your visitors or no information at all.  If you make business decisions based on those stats, you may be making the wrong decisions based on misinformation.

In the case of third-party code causing slow page load times or loading errors, it affects your visitors’ experiences on your website.  Unhappy visitors may choose not to buy from you and often times won’t ever return to your website.

So what can you do in this situation? First off, you’ll want to diagnose the problem to make sure it is indeed the third party code causing the problems. AlertBot is an excellent service to use for finding out what is causing a bottleneck in your load time.

Once you know for sure that it is the third party code creating the issue, here are a few things you can do to resolve problems with third-party code:

1. Ask the Third-party provider to resolve the problem – The solution may be as simple as contacting the third party, informing them of the issue(s) you’re having and asking them to fix it. It’s possible that they’re not even aware there’s a problem.
2. Remove the third party code altogether – This may be the quickest and easiest solution, but obviously it doesn’t solve the problem if you really need the code on your site.
3. Look for other third party code providers – This may be your best course of action. While it can be time consuming to search for viable solutions, if you need the code, trying something else out could be the most sensible option. And if you can find reviews on the solution from other users who have tried it out, that’s even better.
4. Move to a purchasable / installable application – Free third-party code is great, and just dropping in a piece of third-party code is a nice time saver, but sometimes taking the high road and paying for an installable solution (with support) could be the best option for your business, especially when your own customers or clients are involved.
5. Ask a web developer to look at it – This might not be possible for every site owner, but it’s an especially good option if your company has a programming department. There’s a good chance that just moving the code to a different location in your page’s HTML (or onto a different page altogether) could drastically improve the situation.

So, as you can see, third party code can greatly impact your website. And if you’re experiencing some web performance issues and you’re utilizing third party code, there’s a pretty good chance that code may be the catalyst for those problems.

Sign up for a risk-free trial of AlertBot today and start down the path to better performance for your website.  AlertBot can track the performance of all your third-party code and lets you know when it’s causing problems.

What: Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition (IRCE) is the flagship event for the e-commerce industry. Learn the latest trends in the industry from experts who are implementing the latest technologies and solutions. IRCE 2016 will take place in the world-class city of Chicago, IL.

When: June 7-10, 2016

Where: McCormick Place West, Chicago, IL

At IRCE, AlertBot will be demonstrating its TrueBrowser® Web Application Monitoring solution. TrueBrowser® technology combines advanced performance tracking and error detection with real web browser testing to provide customers with best-in-class website monitoring solutions.

Planning to Attend?

If you’re planning on attending, make sure to stop by the AlertBot booth to meet our team, see a demo and get some cool AlertBot swag. If you would like to sit down for a one-on-one demo during the conference, please don’t hesitate to email us ahead of time. Oh, and mention this newsletter announcement when you meet us at our booth and we’ll give you an extra spin on our prize wheel for a chance to win a second prize!

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.

Web developers know browser compatibility can be a real headache, however, browser compatibility doesn’t just affect web developers. Recently, one AlertBot customer received an alert that their site had failed. When investigating the failure, they found that their site was actually not completely down, but that AlertBot had discovered that their site had stopped working in just one browser. Their website was working fine with Chrome, Internet Explorer (IE), Safari, etc, but had stopped loading with Firefox. Thanks to AlertBot’s TrueBrowser™ Monitoring options, which allowed them to test their website in multiple browsers, they were able to identify the problem with that one browser quickly and fix it.

For web developers, it’s easy to simply open your site in each of the popular web browsers to check it for compatibility, find that it’s working smoothly, and then never follow-up on it again. However, websites, servers and backend resources change often. AlertBot’s TrueBrowser™ Monitors can be set up to check your site regularly with each of the popular web browsers and make sure nothing has changed. So, for example, with AlertBot, you can set up a Test Scenario to check your website with Chrome, another one to check it with Firefox, then another with IE, etc. This way, you’ll know the very instant your site stops functioning within one of these popular browsers.

It’s also just a super easy way to not have to worry about browser compatibility as often. Think about it; these days, web browsers are constantly auto-updating to new versions and web masters are constantly updating their websites. It’s a lot to keep up with–testing your site’s performance with each browser every time this happens–so having something as simple as an automatic browser monitor frequently testing your site’s reliability is one less worry for website owners.

Take the AlertBot TrueBrowser™ Monitor for a spin with a completely free trial and let us start watching your back for you!

Velocity Conference 2015 Recap

The AlertBot team just returned from last week’s Velocity Conference event in Santa Clara, California. We had a great time meeting a lot of people who share our affinity for web performance. And, despite some air turbulence during the trek that rendered more than one of us uncomfortably queasy, we enjoyed the trip from the humid weather in Eastern Pennsylvania to the crisp breezy air of California.

As a VelocityCon sponsor, we had a booth set up in the exhibit hall, which allowed Velocity-goers to peruse various tables showcasing unique and recognizable products and brands (Even NetFlix and Amazon were there?!) and pick up some fun swag along the way. For example, Target had these awesome little plush versions of their canine mascot to give away (which a couple of us snatched up for our little Bots back home), HP had silicone cell phone speaker amplifiers, JFrog had foam frogs and “Batfrog” superhero spoof tees, Verizon offered a pair of ping pong balls, and our booth neighbors (x) Matters gave away old school handset phone receivers you can plug into your cell phone. So, yeah, there were quite a few fun things you could snag from any given booth.

If you visited us at the AlertBot booth, you had the opportunity to listen to us give a little talk on the AlertBot’s monitoring services and then take a spin of our prize wheel (carnival, style!). Many attendees walked away with a cool new remote control helicopter, while others got to grab AlertBot swag like travel mugs, highlighters or Frisbees. We even had a drawing to win a brand new Apple Watch, which we announced on the last day of the conference. The lucky winner even got to take it home that day too (congratulations to Craig T. from Constant Contact!).

Events like these are great because it allows us all to step out from behind the comfort of a desk chair and computer screen to meet our customers in person and discuss our projects face-to-face. Velocity was a nice opportunity for this.

But hey, if you weren’t at Velocity, that doesn’t mean we can’t meet! Shoot us an email. We’d love to talk to you and tell you why we think AlertBot is right for you – and why we know you’re gonna love it!

Neeraj posted screenshots from his personal Android browser that indicated a new red “SLOW” icon branded next to links for YouTube and even a Google search result (scholar.google.co.in, to be exact). Today, we tried to replicate the same result on an iPhone, but were unable to bring up any “Slow” icons on our search results. (And comments on Neeraj’s report page seemed to reflect similar experiences.)

So what does this mean? It’s possible that Neeraj happened to stumble on a brief Google testing of an upcoming new search result feature, and if this is indeed on the horizon for the near future, website owners may want to do all they can to avoid that little dreaded scarlet branding.

Should this feature come to light soon, now would really be the ideal time to find a Website monitoring solution for your business’s website to ensure visitors and new clients aren’t deterred by Google’s little warning.

Click here for a list of solutions and more info on how AlertBot can help.