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People are getting used to broadband connections, more powerful web browsers, and a speedier web experience in general. A new study shows how the expectations of Internet users have changed significantly over the last couple of years. We expect websites to be a lot faster.
The Facebook engineering blog often presents interesting findings about the nuts and bolts of Facebook and the technical side of running that enormous service. The latest post is about Facebook’s experimentation on how site speed affects the behavior of its users, called “Every Millisecond Counts”.
One thing that struck us as extremely interesting was the following findings about site speed.
Last week the BitTorrent site Mininova was hit by a large-scale DDoS attack that caused a total of 14 hours of downtime. Regardless of what you think about torrent sites, this was an interesting example of how a website can be incapacitated by a DDoS attack.
We chose this example to illustrate the effect of a DDoS attack because Mininova shared some relevant information about the attack, especially a very telling traffic graph from their Internet connection. This coupled with some Pingdom monitoring data gave us a chance to look closely at the effects of a DDoS attack.
Considering the massive amount of websites that are using Google Analytics it is of course extremely important that the Google Analytics script is always available and responding well so that website visitors will have no problems loading it.
We use Google Analytics ourselves here at Pingdom and think it’s a great tool for keeping track of our visitor traffic. Since we have included the GA script on both our main website and our blog, we were curious to see how well it performs and how reliable it is (uptime wise).
All Linux distributions have their own home base: their homepage. How well is this homepage taken care of and how well does it perform? To answer these questions we have monitored the uptime and load time of the homepages for 16 Linux distributions for a month.
And since it is a question we can’t resist asking: how do they compare to the homepages of corporate OS giants like Microsoft and Apple? We included those in this survey so that we could answer that question as well.
This report presents an analysis of 100 top blogs, picked from the Technorati top 100 list. For each of these blogs, the front page (homepage) has been analyzed to see how large its download size is and what contributes the most to this size.
We have chosen to not present the blogs individually in this report, but have instead focused on them as a group to get more general data.
Google is about to make landing page load time a factor in their AdWords Quality Score. The goal is to reward fast-loading websites and punish slow-loading ones, all to improve the ever-important user experience. From Google’s Inside AdWords blog: Keywords with landing pages that load very slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher [...]
Forums are a great resource, and there seems to exist at least one for every subject imaginable (yes, really). This being the web, there are of course bound to be a lot of forums that focus on webmasters and web hosting. It isn’t always easy to keep a forum running smoothly. Forum software is notoriously [...]
