“Uptrends is critical to us for knowing if we are making progress in our speed optimizations.”

Ipswitch is a software vendor with their headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts. Ipswitch makes the networked world a safer place to share data with their easy-to-use secure, managed file transfer solutions, FTP server software, and network monitoring solutions. Today, we spoke with Eric Bruyn, Director of Digital Marketing at Ipswitch.

Ipswitch has a global service and publishes their website in English and seven other languages: Japanese, Chinese, Korean, German, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. Using AWS, Ipswitch maintains servers located in the US, Europe, and Asia to ensure a fast experience for their global customer base.

Test from the users’ locations

After migrating their sites to AWS, testing from Massachusetts was ineffective because checks that originated from their home office always pulled the content from the US server. Ipswitch didn’t know if their sites worked well when accessed from other regions when supported by one of the other two servers, so Ipswitch needed another solution.

“When we wanted to check our sites for availability and performance, we used free site speed tools Uptrends was one of the free tools we used most often. Using Uptrends, we could check our sites from regions that would hit our other servers. We liked Uptrends' free tool so much we decided to try the 30-day free trial ; afterward we subscribed. What makes Uptrends so valuable to us is that when there are discrepancies between what somebody in one region of the world experiences versus ours’, it is hard to replicate. Uptrends allows us to put some data up against the problem.”

Uptrends network of over 233 global checkpoints allows Ipswitch to check their site for uptime and performance from their users’ locations. Eric and his team can quickly spot problems affecting subsets of users no matter if they are in Boston, Argentina, Spain, or Bangkok.

Performance is key

“We’ve made some pretty big improvements in our site speed over 2018, so we have KPIs around site speed because site speed is crucial to SEO, bounce rates (especially on mobile), and conversion rates. Uptrends is critical to us to monitor whether or not we are making progress in our speed optimizations or not.”

“When there are discrepancies between what somebody in one region of the world experiences versus ours’, it is hard to replicate. Uptrends allows us to put some data up against the problem.”

“One of the things Uptrends discovered when we migrated to AWS was that the Asia server was really slow with 10 second load times. As it turned out, it was an issue with a certificate. When the website loaded, the Asia server loaded a certificate from the North America server. The request traveled from Asia to America and back again causing severe performance issues.”

Ipswitch understands how performance affects their users and their bottom line. Monitoring with Uptrends lets Ipswitch keep an eye on and quickly identify problems with their user experience. Ipswitch knows that if a problem surfaces, Uptrends Alerting and reporting will help them get to the root cause quickly. Uptrends can help you protect your users and revenue with web site monitoring, web application monitoring, API Monitoring, and Real User Monitoring.