Ecommerce companies completely dependent on the internet for revenue experience increased pressure to provide an always-available, always-working shopping experience for customers. Nasdaq puts estimates for ecommerce-facilitated transactions to be up to 95% by the year 2040. During Black Friday through Cyber Monday 2018, Shopify reported their merchants sold up to $37 million per hour through their ecommerce platform.

Crashed websites and slow loading pages can be devastating for any site owner. But there’s another type of threat that often goes undetected. A report published by FireEye on Thursday details a particular type of DNS hijacking that allows hackers to easily steal information. These attacks have been going on for approximately two years and involve three different methods that compromise websites without alarming users.

There’s nothing more frustrating than a website crash if you don’t know the cause of it. When your business income depends on uptime, downtime can feel like a ticking clock. But why is your website down? What can you do to get it going again?

Already have a monitoring service with your current host? Does your plan include Amazon CloudWatch, Azure Monitor or another proprietary monitoring tool? You might want to check the fine print. These services often provide internal web monitoring only. While they may check HTTP availability from locations outside their network, HTTP checks alone are not sufficient.

At least 10 major data breaches occurred in 2018 including Facebook, Google Plus, WordPress, and healthcare sectors. The surge in breaches proves we need to do a better job detecting foul play. User data and our own IP are crucial assets to safeguard in this environment. We also observed major downtime incidents from companies like Facebook and Microsoft.

Are website visitors experiencing problems with accessing your website or email? Your domain may be blacklisted. If your website isn’t available, blacklists can wreak havoc on your web traffic potentially resulting in lost revenue. It’s crucial to remedy the problem immediately. Uptime.com includes a Domain Blacklist Check to continually monitor your site for issues.

Now that companies depend on the cloud for access to key services and business operations, downtime has a larger impact on productivity. Uptime is just as critical to small businesses as it is to major ecommerce retailers on Black Friday. Even the public relies on various services like Alexa and email to be available throughout the day. Looking at major outages over the past year provides insight into how companies prepare to handle these events.

The Uptime.com Transaction Check tool is evolving. It’s designed to mimic user interactions, and can interact with nearly every element on your website. The Transaction Check is an important monitor for those worried about conversions or signup forms. It can measure landing pages, shopping carts, and other interactive elements, mimicking the customer experience and providing important metrics about response time and errors along the way.

As expected, Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2018 sales broke records. Amazon reported their highest sales day ever on Cyber Monday, though exact numbers weren’t provided. Brick-and-mortar retailers saw a decline in foot traffic by 1.7% on Black Friday, hinting at the importance of website performance for retailers of all sizes. Companies are more conscious of website downtime and its effect on sales.

A changelog is a chronological list of important changes users can reference as an application or service expands. Logs explain what features are added, which are changed or adjusted and what those changes do. They sometimes provide explanation or instruction. Logs are useful for preparing your user base for scheduled downtime, and giving your most loyal users something to look forward to.