Over the past couple of weeks we've been optimising the Downtime Monkey website to reduce page load time. We've had some excellent results: in the best case scenario we cut page load time by 58% and even in the worst case, the page load was still 9% faster. All of the changes that were made are straightforward and we've provided in-depth details of the optimisations so that you can apply them to your own website.

In an ideal world every site would have 100% uptime, 24/7, 365. However, the reality is not so perfect – hardware failures, DNS issues, DDoS attacks, server maintenance, software problems and poor hosting are among the many causes of downtime. It’s not all doom and gloom though – by following a few practical steps you can really cut down on your downtime.

A short interview where Ryan Glass, lead developer on Downtime Monkey and director of Big Toe Web Design, talks about taking Downtime Monkey from idea to reality.

Setting up a new website monitor is quick and easy - we ran some tests and found that on average it takes just 5-10 seconds. Here is a very short video with instructions for adding a new website monitor using a Downtime Monkey Free account.

One of the main challenges we faced when developing Downtime Monkey was internationalization (or depending on your point of view: internationalisation, internacionalización, internasjonalisering). The aim was to provide our services to as many people as possible across the world - we learned a few things in the process and we thought we'd share some tips...

8 months and 116,000 lines of code after starting out we have finally completed the development of Downtime Monkey. There is no doubt that it has turned into a bigger project than we first expected and we're very happy to have reached this stage.