As more businesses move toward e-commerce, the ability to monitor and manage Web-based applications will no longer be an advantage, but a necessity. "If you look at 10 years ago, very little business in comparison was done on the Internet. Now the Internet is just a complete way of life, and it's a matter of survival for businesses to make sure they have the absolute best performance that they can provide."

Valentine's Day is today, and those who have not bought gifts for their loved ones are scurrying around to find the right gift as quickly as possible. This is where the Internet comes in to play. If you have a slow website, most people will give up and go on to another site. That is why every website needs to have stress testing, load testing, and performance testing done before the website is put out on the Internet. "It all comes down to performance because any slowdowns impact the revenue of a company," Robinson Schoeller says. "It used to be OK if you had, say, a six-second response time to load a page. But now it's really a second or less to load. Otherwise you're going to lose those customers to another site, because the competition is just a click away. Keeping customers on the website, and the ability to resolve the issues that are driving them away, becomes significantly more important around high-traffic periods like Valentine's Day."

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/021312-valentines-traffic-spikes-2...