

WatchMouse, a leader in website performance monitoring, monitored the most popular sports sites, belonging to each of the Euro 2008 nations.
Combining the errors, speed (load time) and availability measurements, WatchMouse calculated a Site
Availability Index (SPI) for each of the sites, to reveal that the nations with the best sports sites are France, Spain and the Netherlands.
Sports enthusiasts in Turkey may be disappointed by confirmation that their nation’s favorite sports site ranks as the worst, largely due to long load times.
WatchMouse’s monitoring stations tried to access the homepage of each nations’ favorite sports site every five minutes. With no errors, 100% availability and a load time of less than 4 seconds, France’s http://www.lequipe.fr ranked as the best sports site with an enviably low SPI of 203, while Spain’s http://www.marca.com narrowly took second place
over the Dutch http://www.vi.nl. Of the 16 monitored sites, only Turkey’s http://spor.ekolay.net and Austrian’s http://www.krone.at/sport were found to have ‘serious user issues’.
WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors said, “We’re very pleased to find that many of the Euro 2008 nations have sports sites that function really well. We hope that as we continue monitoring, we’ll see Turkey’s national sports site improve as dramatically as their game did on Sunday!”
Euro 2008 Sport Sites League Table:
Rank Country Site SPI
1. France http://www.lequipe.fr 203
2. Spain http://www.marca.com 478
3. Netherlands http://www.vi.nl 488
4. Croatia http://sportskenovosti.hr 653
5. Germany http://www.sportbild.de 657
6. Italy http://www.gazzetta.it 767
7. Switzerland http://www.blink.ch/sport 785
8. Czech Republic http://www.sportovninoviny.cz 838
9. Greece http://www.sport24.gr 1000
10. Sweden http://www.aftonbladet.se/sportbladet 1051
11. Poland http://www.sport.pl 1169
12. Russia http://www.russiatoday.ru/sports 1275
13. Portugal http://www.abola.pt 1214
14. Romania http://www.gsp.ro 1486
15. Austria http://www.krone.at/sport 2041
16. Turkey http://spor.ekolay.net 2796
Since monitoring started on 11 June 2008, one of WatchMouse’s monitoring stations has tried to access the homepage of each of the 16 sites, every five minutes. Sites are expected to download within 4 seconds without any errors.
Combining the errors, speed (load time) and availability measurements, WatchMouse calculated a SPI for each of the sites. An SPI of less than 1,000 represents a ‘well performing’ site, 1,001 – 1,999 is regarded as ‘acceptable’, while a score of above 2,000 represents a site with ‘serious user issues’.
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