Pop quiz, hotshot. How much does it cost to build a self-hosted Kubernetes cluster? Quick, no conferring. If you thought the answer was “nothing”, go to the back of the class. According to distributed systems expert Cindy Sridharan, quoted in Cloud Native DevOps with Kubernetes, the answer is “one million dollars”: It takes well over a million dollars just in engineer salary to get Kubernetes up and running from scratch. And you still might not get there.

You manage one of the world’s largest messaging platforms. It’s the middle of the afternoon and you are feeling confidence set in. Your company has recently beefed up its capacity, and performance has never been better. You’re about to step out for a late lunch when a drop in metrics starts triggering alarms. What do you do? *record scratch* Yep, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation…

Every process on the net is a logical journey, including the Google blacklist – even when it’s done in error. Nothing kills profits like losing your web traffic; so here’s all you need to know about blacklists, how to avoid them, and – if your site is branded with a red warning banner – how to get off them.

An acquaintance of mine works for a company that still uses Windows XP to manage some internal applications. The higher ups of the company refuse to adopt the new versions, given costs and technical gaps, and it’s created something of a Pandora’s box for employee turnover. With no strong internal reference documentation, each new departure leaves IT wondering two things. This rather amusing conundrum is apparently not an isolated incident.

For the first 6 months of 2020, Google has continued its monopoly on search engine use with an average net market share of 69.24%. Google’s continued favoritism puts it in a position to funnel the bulk of interested organic web traffic to your business making its blacklist a costly place to be. So, how do you stay on this giant’s good side?

Slack recently had a no good very bad day in which some broken external monitoring contributed to a perfect storm. But one passage caught our eye: “After the incident was mitigated, the first question we asked ourselves was why our monitoring didn’t catch this problem. We had alerting in place for this precise situation, but unfortunately, it wasn’t working as intended.

No, this isn’t physics news; hold that Nobel Prize. This is about downtime; the dark matter of the web. It’s invisible to most of us, but its gravity has huge effects on commerce, companies, and markets. For everybody who does business online, unplanned website or service outages drag down their revenue, drag down their profits, and drag down their brand.

Uptime.com has been ranked #1 in Customer Support, and has been voted Most Likely to Recommend by the G2 Crowd Community. These terrific achievements cap off a year of activity and updates that have helped Uptime.com remain a market leader in IT alerting and web monitoring solutions. With top scores in IT Alerting and Web Monitoring, Uptime.com continues to grow alongside our userbase to create the most powerful and accessible web monitoring platform.

Scaling sort of sneaks up on you, doesn’t it? One day, you’re carefree, the next you start to notice something is off… Maybe it’s the crashing, or the frequent dips in performance. Could it be the new hire? It’s not DNS. Is it DNS? Scaling is a natural part of the business process, and your infrastructure will start to change completely as your userbase doubles and triples.

It’s 3 AM and you are roused out of sleep by the dull buzzing of your phone in the other room. Some sort of emergency, you conclude as you fumble with the lockscreen. There it is: an alert that the API governing user registration is acting up. When we think about the lag between time of incident and time to respond, it’s not just about how long the system went down. How long it physically takes us to respond to the problem also contributes to lost downtime.