bengreen.com

I’ve been using uptime and performance monitoring services for 11 years, starting in 1999 with RedAlert (now Keynote RedAlert) and recently completed implementation of Alertsite’s Deja Click product.   Not only does Alertsite tell you whether or not your site is up, it also provides insight as to how long it takes to respond to requests from users around the world.   For online marketing to global audiences, this is a crucial set of metrics.   Take for example a business selling services not just in North America, but to global markets including Asia-Pacific and Europe.   A site hosted at corporate HQ in New York City may respond well for users in the United States, but what about response time across the globe?

To make a business case to my colleagues that we needed to make investments in and upgrades to not just our own hardware, but that we also need to consider contracting with a Content Delivery service such as Akamai, I needed hard numbers to provide justification for the expense.    Soon after implementing Alertsite’s global monitoring solution it was clear that the site in question had serious response time deficiencies for audiences in Asia and Europe, and we are now weighing our options for either a DYI CDN or contracting with a service.

In addition to response time/uptime, Alertsite has a feature called Deja Click which simulates a real-life user experience by hitting a monitored site through Firefox, examining each element of a page – images, scripts, forms, etc.   The bottom line?  For short money, interactive marketers can achieve a very high return on investment by gaining knowledge and insight as to a site’s performance across a broad, global spectrum of user experiences.  It’s well worth it.

http://www.alertsite.com