Everyone who operates an online business understands the importance of having fast website response times. When webpages are simple to perceive, the user will spend more time on your pages, and are much more likely to spend money while they are there.

The "end user", or the client, or buyer who visits your website, is the entire reason your website was built, and having a deep understanding of how to influence their behavior while on your website can be critical to your business's success.

For your website to be visible on the internet, your domain name has to be pointed to the name servers of your hosting provider. Visitors are able to access your website using your domain name rather than the IP addresses because of the Domain Name System (DNS). 

With their assortment of techniques to prohibit access to websites they do not like, China is probably the country where the “Site not found” errors are most common, with the possible exception of North Korea. This can be frustrating, especially if your website isn’t intended to be politically subversive in any way, but it happens to contain out-of-context keywords that the Chinese authorities have deemed undesirable. This broad brushstroke is unfortunate, but luckily, there are ways to bypass the China Firewall and get past China’s so-called Golden Shield.

The concept of the Domain Name System (DNS) can be a confusing subject even to skilled and experienced system administrators. DNS is the system used to abbreviate Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, which are in the form of numbers, to memorable, user-friendly names. These Domain names address systems on TCP/IP networks (e.g. the Internet) by certain Web applications, such as browsers. This system enables computers to communicate using numeric addresses and computer users to use simpler names, for example, “www.google.com” and “www.yahoo.com,” to call up services, including websites and email servers on the internet.

How Domains and the Domain Name System Work

When you type a domain name into your browser’s address bar, your computer (or client) sends the name to a publicly accessible computer called a DNS server. This server contains a database mapping of human-readable names to their corresponding numeric addresses. The DNS server sends back a response to the client computer and informs it of the IP address of the target system you would like to access, thus enabling it to send the request directly to the target. Through a process known as recursion, the DNS server may also request the IP from other DNS servers.

You may want to measure any given server's response time for any reason, but the most common one is to gain a better understanding of the visitor's experience by using external testing locations. Another reason would be to ensure that the website is accessible by your clients. By performing a visitor emulation, you can determine the status of the server and get additional statistics based on the time it takes for each one to complete.