Imagine going to the store and waiting in line for 10 minutes while the cashier calls the manager over to help the customer in front of you. That is how it feels when you are waiting for a slow webpage to load. You get impatient and even contemplate moving to a new checkout line (or website). Many people want to shop, bank, and pay bills online because it is quicker. You don’t have to spend the time driving to the bank and waiting in line.

Today’s economy has created a new class of worker: the IT consultant. This lone warrior often manages multiple websites, responding to anything from outages to update requests and every code debug in between. If one can manage the never ending onslaught of servers, API calls and transactions these sites rely on each day, it’s a pretty decent living. The key is removing all the menial work that overwhelms and stifles productivity.

When it comes to loading time, every second counts. In fact, studies show people will never return to your site if it takes longer than a couple of seconds to load. Site speed should be high on your list of performance improvements. On the internet, you really do only get one chance to make a first impression. That’s why speed testing is so important, but it shouldn’t stop at the development phase. Site speed should be continually monitored every step of the way.

Our primary focus at Uptime.com is creating a tool that can monitor every critical piece of infrastructure that drives the work you do. We created a series of checks to accomplish this task, with API and Transaction checks offering unprecedented flexibility. The next step was a mechanism for controlling how alerts were issued. The Advanced Check Options we’ll look at today are aimed at controlling when and how alerts are issued.

In this post we’ll cover how our corporate clients can consolidate logins with Single Sign On (SSO). This Uptime.com feature allows corporate entities to leverage existing logins to authenticate users. SSO streamlines access to valuable Uptime.com features, enabling users faster access through a secure corporate network.

IT professionals have to efficiently manage several dozen to several hundred critical pieces of infrastructure a modern business needs to stay afloat. Even smaller businesses often encounter this challenge. We understand that at every level, the time spent researching these issues comes at a cost. That’s why we’ve built some time-saving measures into Uptime.com to help you make more efficient use of your most precious resource: your time.

Accountability is an important part of the work IT professionals do, especially when it comes to security and outages. A minor change by a single tech or engineer can crash entire systems, and it’s sometimes crucial to question that person on their methods and changes to determine a solution. Accountability is especially important when several people are regularly using the same tool.

API checks are as simple or complex as you need them to be, offering a great deal of functionality in checking the uptime of your own tools. Combined with a powerful programming interface like REST API, your checks can prove quite useful. These checks are multi-step, meaning you can ask it to do almost anything so long as you present those requests in a syntax your server understands. The key to an API check is formatting your requests properly.

We want to begin this post by thanking our long-time Uptime.com members for bearing with us through the transition to our new user interface. You have no doubt noticed the changes. The adjustments to the UI are small, but some important features are now in a different place. Our intent was a more intuitive design. Today, we’ll walk you through some of our most important decisions in this post. First, we’ll document some changes to be aware of.

Because email is communication is prevalent in today’s business landscape, use Uptime.com’s email server checks to continually monitor email server status. Let’s get familiar with the three different types of email checks you can implement. Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) checks monitor the flow of email across the Internet.