After six years operating as an independent company, web site monitoring and testing firm SiteConfidence was recently acquired by NCC Group, an IT assurance, security and consultancy firm. The takeover has enabled SiteConfidence to pour more resources into serving its customers and developing new services, according to the company’s director, Bob Dowson.

SiteConfidence specialises in monitoring the performance of web sites, applications and online tools. “We load test and monitor the technical performance of sites ­ approaching them in two ways,” Dowson said. “We can do it externally, by simulating a user and going through the relevant processes ­ whatever it is that the firm wants to assess ­ and then analysing the results.” However, the firm’s main business is to go in and monitor performance from the inside. “We do regular monitoring for 4,000 or so mostly blue-chip firms,” he said.

When load testing, SiteConfidence replicates any number of users entering a site at a certain time and performing certain functions. This can be done on a live site or in a pre-production environment.

“Firms have to know that when they go live their sites work properly. There have been so many incidents of sites crashing or failing that these days businesses see testing [in this way] as being like insurance,” Dowson said. “Testing should be part of the development strategy, not a consideration one week from launch,” he added.
Assessing a site’s performance can involve simulating as many as 10,000 users, and sometimes far more than that. “It all depends on the needs of the client,” Dowson said. “The BBC or Yahoo would need to test with a massive load, but a smaller retailer may only test with 100 to 500 users.”

The largest number of simulated users that the firm has been asked to test a site against is 40,000, but Dowson said SiteConfidence could go higher than that if a client required it.

Dowson said that in the early days of the web explaining the benefits of testing to firms was not easy, but now the sheer number of internet users has made it a necessity.

“There are millions of people online, going about doing things, and some firms generate tens of millions of clicks. The internet is such a priceless channel that it has really fuelled concern about what happens when things go wrong, and interest in what we do,” he said.

The same problems pop up time and again, according to Dowson. “A lot of the errors we see are very common. Typically they are basic design errors that are easily fixed. We often come across Flash images that look nice but can take a long time to load for an external user,” he said.

SiteConfidence does not provide fixes, however. “We are in the business of flagging up problems, not fixing them,” Dawson said.