A screenshot of Panopta's holiday monitoring website
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — As Thanksgiving preparation gets underway, security providers and data center firms are providing tips for end-users to keep safe online during the shopping weekend, as well as offering tools for e-commerce websites to monitor their performance.
On Wednesday, internet security provider Comodo released seven questions for online shoppers to ask themselves in order to prevent malware. The questions also help shoppers navigate the purchase of electronic devices such as smartphones or tablets.
“Many of us have learned the steps to take in order to make the holidays run smoother, but in 2011, making sure you shop safely online and prevent malware from infecting your newly purchased electronic devices is more important than finding the best time to avoid the crowds at the mall,” Melih Abdulhayoglu, Comodo’s CEO and chief security architect said in a statement.
Comodo says it is important for shoppers to ask about malware protection when purchasing e-readers, smartphones or tablets and be aware of the security and malware prevention on the PC they are using to purchase gifts.
In addition, Comodo says users shouldn’t open up holiday greetings from addresses they don’t recognize, and make sure that they don’t click on links online unless they know they are secure. Online shoppers should update their security software, and if they are purchasing a security solution, to make sure support is available.
“The holidays are a prime time for people to purchase electronic devices as gifts for loved ones and it is especially important that every device is properly secured against potential malware attacks,” Abdulhayoglu said in a statement. “The rate at which new malware is coming on the market is staggering and it is imperative that users ask themselves these very simple questions to help avoid a malware infection and the massive headache that comes along with it.”
Data center firm Equinix has partnered with technology performance provider Compuware to launch an online test tool to help e-commerce providers ensure their website performance is adequate for the holiday shopping season.
The free tool will evaluate the performance of websites against four other URLs, which could include competitors, industry leaders or other pages on a specific website. The tool is available here. According to the website, the results include daily report delivered by email for 7 days.
“Research shows that 40 percent of consumers will not wait more than three seconds for a page to load before leaving a website, and this expectation is only increasing,” Chris Sharp, general manager of content and digital media at Equinix said in a statement. “In fact, delays of only several milliseconds can frustrate some visitors enough to drive them away before they become customers. At Equinix, we are committed to helping ecommerce and digital media companies on Platform Equinix to not only scale quickly and avoid downtime, but also achieve better site performance and thus drive revenue for their business. This becomes particularly important during the busy Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping days when consumers are particularly eager to get in on the best deals.”
Website monitoring service Panopta has released a new holiday site that aggregates monitoring data of many top e-commerce sites to show current outages and recent performance. The website shows the number of shopping sites that are down, and includes a list of the sites that have recently experienced downtime, the length of the outage and the percentage of uptime for the website as well. In chart form, it also has the logo of the company so it is easy for shoppers to quickly scroll and find the site they are looking for. The statistics are based on Panopta’s checks of each site every minute making requests from its global network of monitoring locations. Panopta says it will add any sites that users are missing from the list, according to its website.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson writes full-time for the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, and has been writing for the WHIR since September 2010. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
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