“Within 24 hours of signing up, we caught an outage on one of our new services.”

HockeyShare is a SaaS (Software as a Service) business based in Chicago, Illinois. HockeyShare provides cloud-based tools to over 40,000 users. HockeyShare’s user base consists of hockey coaches from children’s leagues to the NHL. In this interview, we talk with Keven Muller, Founder of HockeyShare.

Coaches depend on HockeyShare for managing and animating drills and managing practice plans for their teams. HockeyShare simplifies and expedites the planning process so that coaches can spend more time with their players and less time producing drills. To maintain their promise of reducing planning time by 90%, HockeyShare knows that their service depends on a fast loading, reliable website.

Uptrends website monitoring is better than a hockey mask at saving face

Your website influences your user’s overall perception of your brand and your product. So non-responsive apps, 404 errors, expired or invalid SSL certificates, or worse yet, the “Site not Found” error all negatively affect your user’s opinion of your brand.

“Using the waterfall reports, we’ve been able to reduce our home page overhead by about twenty-two percent.”

With Uptrends monitors, you can help ensure a quality experience for your users. Before making updates to HockeyShare’s new HTML5 mobile app, HockeyShare’s Uptrends monitoring found issues with the update.

“Within 24 hours of signing up, we caught an outage on one of our new services we’re bringing online and were able to fix the problem before it affected our users. We saved quite a bit of egg on our face from having a product pushed out there that would not have done anything; it would have sat there and looked at you funny.”

When making even simple changes to your code, architecture, or content, even with regression testing, some issues don’t surface right away. HockeyShare learned immediately from their Uptrends monitors that they had a problem. Uptrends monitoring and HockeyShare’s fast actions prevented an embarrassing situation.

An international sport requires a global web monitoring solution

The Great White North comes to mind when thinking about hockey, but the sport is played on all seven continents. Therefore, HockeyShare monitors their service from all of Uptrends' 233 global checkpoints. Using Uptrends checkpoints, HockeyShare noticed that they had a lot of performance issues in Canada. With a few adjustments to their CDNs, all of HockeyShare’s users get the same great experience.

Web performance monitoring and a fast-paced game

Like chasing a hockey puck, keeping up with your website’s performance is a continuous, fast-paced pursuit that requires diligence and the right tools. HockeyShare uses the Full Page Check to keep a close eye on their home page.

“Using the waterfall reports, we’ve been able to reduce our home page overhead by about twenty-two percent. We’re still making tweaks to actually further improve that, so what we’re seeing is on average about half a second of load time being shaved off during our peak times. Which for us is big. Our server loads spike at specific times because hockey coaches are all doing their planning at the same time, so all of sudden our site gets slammed. That half second makes a big difference for our users.”

HockeyShare knows that time is important to their users, and every performance optimization they can make enhances their user’s experience. Studies* have shown that delays as small as 400 ms is enough to drive away users. Keeping your users requires diligence, for improved web performance isn’t a one time fix. Changes in networks, hardware, content, databases, user location, and user devices all affect how your website or service performs. Uptrends will notify you immediate when your website or service drops below your performance standards.

*Source: Google Research Blog

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