PROBLEM: Customers complain about site outages and slow site responses. The hosting company claims that the issues have been resolved. Customers remain dissatisfied.
METHODOLOGY: External website monitoring on a page-by-page basis at minute intervals, highlighted issues.
SOLUTION: Realign shared hosting, fix database indexing, upgrade DNS server, change web host's BGP configuration, and regularly monitor the site.
STORY:
Once considered an alternative marketing channel, online shopping has carved out its own niche in the market. The online shopping sector has grown rapidly, outpacing other industries and opening up new business prospects. Factors contributing to the continued growth of online shopping include wider product lines, convenience, lower prices and the availability of clear product information. Recent major investments in e-commerce by companies large and small have energized the industry and strengthened its roots.
This growth was not easy. Although most shopping sites feel like they've gotten over the lingering growing pains, some remain. A recent survey by Andersen Consulting Services reveals that more than 25 percent of online shopping fails during the holiday season due to site outages. Another survey by the NDP Group revealed that up to 23 percent of online shoppers still experience temporary website outages, late deliveries and customer service issues.
Dotcom-Monitor website monitoring network specializes in ensuring performance and uptime in online transaction processes, including shopping carts, logins and form submissions. By simulating end-use actions, Dotcom-Monitor.com verifies every step in a transaction, not only for correct content, but also for required performance. If some test parameters fall outside the specified range, the responsible personnel are immediately informed.
One of Dotcom-Monitor's recent customers, a large online auto parts retailer, contacted Dotcom-Monitor with concerns about website performance issues. Even after aggressive marketing campaigns, this parts retailer still saw a decline in its online business. Customers have constantly complained about website outages and slow website responses. Despite repeated complaints from the IT department about the ASP provider and assurances from the hosting company that the issues had been resolved, customers remained unsatisfied.
Recognizing the potential disaster for their online business, the IT department sought out an external monitoring service provider to monitor their e-commerce site 24/7 and identify issues and dependencies that were causing website downtime.
After monitoring for one minute every day for 7 days, the following problems were detected:
1) Slow website response
Dotcom-Monitor's "report by hour" function quickly discovered problems causing poor performance. The one-minute performance data collected was aggregated on an hourly basis into a single weekly report. This report provides summary statistics about the transaction by hour. Information such as average response time (in seconds), time taken to access the site, and the number of successes and failures provided a clear picture of the site's performance at different daily intervals. Using Dotcom Monitor's proprietary algorithm, it was possible to calculate slow website response times. Dotcom-Monitor found that although the e-commerce website was hosted on a dedicated shared server, at certain times of the day other applications on the server consumed most of its resources. This resulted in slow website response. It only happened during certain hours because the conflicting app only ran a few times a day.
2) Slow website response
The seller's IT department also found that several pages within the transaction, such as the shipping history and "invoice printout", were extremely slow. They took a long time to load, causing shoppers to leave the site and call customer service instead. Unfortunately, other pages within the same transaction were loading extremely fast. Because of this inconsistency within the network, Dotcom-Monitor was able to identify specific online sites that were slow and trace the problem to a database table accessed by those sites. Once the correct indexing was done, the problem was solved.
3) Problem accessing the website
At certain intervals during the day, the seller's site became completely inaccessible. A number of services such as mail servers, websites and proxy servers would become unavailable to the online world. To make matters worse, the ISP couldn't find any problems, but customers kept complaining. After a "ping-pong game" to detect problems between ISPs and customers, Dotcom Monitor enables its "DNS Monitoring". Dotcom-Monitor tested the vendor's DNS servers by querying the specific servers they were performing every minute, monitoring websites showed that one DNS server was occasionally unable to resolve an address. This meant that the DNS server supporting the organization was not working consistently. The dealer upgraded the DNS server and the problem was resolved.
4) Different website responses from different geographies
Continuous monitoring showed that this seller's shopping cart website responded at different speeds from different locations. Some customers complained that the site took too long to open, while others had no problems. A traceroute snapshot was recorded using Dotcom-Monitor's "Report by Location" feature, which collects data from multiple remote agents at different locations. This message was accompanied by an error message from all the locations where the slowdown was detected. After analyzing the data, it was discovered that the ISP hosting the website was using several providers that were not communicating properly with certain networks. This network peering problem has identified and forwarded to the ISP. They took the necessary steps to fix the problem by changing the BGP configuration.
5) Website downtime required frequent monitoring
The retailer's website suffered occasional outages, leading to customer dissatisfaction. Outages were mostly related to software defects that the customer was unable to fix in a short time. These glitches usually required manual intervention. Enter Dotcom-Monitor. The goal of reducing downtime was to alert key personnel immediately of any problem. As soon as website monitoring detects any problems with the web server, a notification will be sent immediately by phone and SMS to call the staff. This reduced downtime from an average of 25 minutes to less than 5 minutes.
In today's highly competitive environment, customer expectations for website availability and performance are increasing every day. What was acceptable a few years ago is no longer the case today. Website monitoring features such as instant alerts, detailed reports, and summary statistics help clients find and address issues, and thus enhance the customer experience.
Outsourced website monitoring services offered by companies like Dotcom-Monitor have helped customers investigate problems and discover otherwise elusive data needed to take corrective action before receiving customer complaints. Dotcom-Monitor.com's services span all industries. It is important to note that website monitoring services are a must for all critical services and are not limited to the current example of shopping cart customers. In industries like finance, insurance, medical and manufacturing, or any industry that requires high website uptime and excellent website responsiveness, it becomes imperative to use external website monitoring services.
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