Announcing SolarWinds Observability

As anyone with some experience running web applications will tell you, page speed is one of the most critical aspects to monitor. Page speed has a major impact on the user’s behavior. Will they stay on the site and complete the purchase, order, or transaction? Will they recommend the service to others? Bad page speed […]

Synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring (RUM) are two extremely different approaches that can be used to measure how your site is performing. While synthetic monitoring relies on automatic simulated tests, RUM records the behavior of actual visitors on your site.

Let’s look back at the highs and lows from 2010 to 2019. From the viral Double Rainbow video to the Browser Wars and notorious outages, we’ve put together a brief review of internet news from the last decade. EXPLORE THE REVIEW What are some of your notable internet moments of the past decade? Leave a […]

Poor digital experience can kill your business. 57% of shoppers have left a slow e-commerce site and then bought from a similar retailer; 23% of shoppers subsequently never returned to the site, according to Yottaa. So even if you provide a positive customer experience nine out of 10 times, the one time you don’t could […]

Seasonality in E-Commerce Comes in Many Forms Many e-commerce sites deal with seasonality. Trends such as meteorological seasons, or annual events like Christmas, Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving, and more, increase the demand substantially, creating massive sales opportunities at specific peak moments throughout the year. A fair percentage (up to about 30%) of annual revenue can come […]

Being notified by a customer, friend, or someone outside your office that a website is down is, quite frankly, embarrassing. All websites run into trouble from time to time. Murphy’s Law will make sure of that. There are simply too many things that can break a website, from server hardware issues, software issues, coding errors, […]

In the ultra-competitive online world, every millisecond counts. If a page takes too long to load, impatient visitors will go elsewhere. To help retain audience and boost sales, website owners invest heavily in tools and tweaks to squeeze every bit of performance out of their WordPress-based websites. Here’s our selection of five tools typically used […]

Website status checks should be a routine part of any IT maintenance schedule. Corporate websites are often hosted externally, but this doesn’t mean they should be excluded from the checklist of applications and servers needing to be monitored. But what’s website status, and how do you check it properly? Website Status – What You Need […]

The time it takes a page to load has become one of the defining factors for website success. Web users are notoriously impatient, abandoning any site they feel is taking too long to load. Reducing page load time should be a strategic priority for all website owners, given that it impacts many other metrics such as pages per session, bounce rate, and conversion rate.

Even a few seconds of downtime may have a direct and substantial effect on the company balance sheet, especially for e-commerce. The impact of downtime isn’t solely about lost sales as many visitors are landing on your webpages to conduct research about future purchases. If the website is offline during this research process, the effect […]

APIs make the world a bit smarter. They help us improve and extend what others have already built. They allow us to use data and functionality in ways the API authors couldn’t imagine. The SolarWinds® Pingdom® product team always wants to empower our customers and give them full access to their data and our functionality. […]

For decades, supercomputers have helped scientists perform calculations that would not have been possible on regular computers of that time. Not only has the construction of supercomputers helped push the envolope of what is possible within the computing field, but the calculations supercomputers have performed for us have helped further both science and technology, and ultimately our lives.

This post pays tribute to some of the most powerful supercomputers the world has seen, all the way from the 1970s until today.

If a tree falls in the woods, does anyone hear it? If no one visits your website—the web application critical to your business—does it really exist? And if they do visit, their actions there determine the value of what you’ve built. And if it doesn’t matter, your site won’t exist for long, because the investments […]

Work-Life Unbalance Stress is at an all-time high in the workplace and at home. It’s hard to leave your stress at the office when you bring your computer home or have email, Slack, and more on your phone. An article in Forbes on January 19 shared a study by the Korn Ferry Institute, revealing that […]

Most website elements, such as scripts, images, and videos, have either direct or indirect impact on web performance. Reduce the number of errors and optimize the underlying elements correctly, and you’ll significantly improve the availability, performance, and profitability of your online operations. A website error checker is an invaluable tool for helping you get a […]

SolarWinds® Pingdom® and SolarWinds AppOptics™ are two products used for monitoring web applications. If both of these products monitor web applications, why would someone want to use them together? This blog post answers that question. At a high level, Pingdom monitors your application from the outside looking in, similar to how your users experience it, […]

It took 51 years before hard disk drives reached the size of 1 TB (terabyte, i.e. 1,000 GB). This happened in 2007. In 2009, the first hard drive with 2 TB of storage arrived. So while it took 51 years to reach the first terabyte, it took just two years to reach the second.

This article looks back at how hard disk drives have evolved since they first burst onto the scene in 1956. We’ll examine the radical changes over time for three different aspects of HDDs: Size, storage space, and price.

On the internet, content is king—but the technology serving your website is queen. A speedy, responsive website is crucial to positive user experience, and to driving sales. Optimizing your WordPress website should be a strategic priority, especially if its goal is to drive conversions. Here are 11 best practice tips to help improve your site performance.

Maintaining maximum website uptime is vital to competing in the always-online global market. This is particularly crucial for e-commerce businesses, where every second of downtime may cost millions in lost revenue in terms of aborted transactions, plus loss of future business from customers who refuse to return.

Digital experience monitoring (DEM for short) is fundamental to delivering a great experience to customers. Why? The quality of experience offered to website visitors has a direct bearing on how much they spend (if anything), and whether they go on to become a repeat customer.