Site24×7 Blogs

InterOp is a leading technology event which is held every year in Las Vegas during the month of May. Business and technology leaders attend Interop to get the most up to date information available on key technologies, learn about the latest trends and meet with leading vendors.

This year the event was held at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. Site24×7 was one among the products featured in this year’s event. Site24×7 was described as a “hosted service helps IT managers understand the end-user experience of Web sites and Web applications from around the globe”.

Networkworld had a slideshow on the top products featured in Interop 2009. Below is an excerpt:

If your servers are located in India or if your company has business interests in the Indian region, it is definitely worthwhile to keep track of how your website is behaving for Indian users. Now you can accomplish this by making use of our new Indian monitoring location.

You just need to configure a website monitor in Site24×7 and select the Indian server for your site. Site24×7 will then continuously monitor your website from India and send out alerts if there are any problems such as downtime or slow page loading.

The Indian server is located in the city of Chennai in the southern part of India.

This is our 4th monitoring location in Asia after Singapore, China and Japan. With the addition of this new monitoring location, the number of locations in our Global Website Monitoring Network has gone up to 15.

We came across two articles about Site24×7 recently and want to share them with our readers. The first one is from DB Virtual Services blog and the post is titled “Monitor your websites from wherever you are”. This one is a quick review of Site24×7 and gives a brief idea of what webmasters and website owners can accomplish with Site24×7.

Here are a few excerpts from the article:

 Do you manage a personal or business website? Do you know if your website is up and running when you’re not online and monitoring yourself the site? Today, we’ll review an important and useful service that will allow you to monitor your website, services and servers around the globe and be notified the uptime and performance of your websites. Let’s review: Site24×7.

You can read the full article here.

The second article is in the Techmixer website. This one is actually a compilation of some of the free website monitoring services available today and the list includes Site24×7 among other services.

Here are a few excerpts:

Subscribe monitoring website uptime is essential services for every webmaster. With the website uptime monitoring services, you can earlier aware the downtime of your website and take necessary step to overcome the downtime problem.

Most of us nowadays own a blog and when it comes to high traffic load, we cannot actually say when will the website/blog server goes down. Without a proper web monitoring service, it would be difficult to check the uptime of the server and which in turn would end up losing visitors and monetization revenue for the blog.

Site 24 X 7 offer free two website monitoring for their free account every 60 minutes or above. The URL address uptime and performance will be monitor from multiple geographical locations. Plus you will get email/SMS alerts and reports.

Beside that, Site 24 X 7 also monitor DNS servers & email server round-trip time

You can read the full article here.

Have you come across any blog post or article about Site24×7? If so, please feel free to share with us.

After adding monitoring servers in Germany, Australia, South Africa and some US states in the last quarter of 2008, we are now focusing on expanding our monitoring network in the Asian continent. Earlier our lone monitoring server in Asia used to be in Singapore. Now we have added servers in China and Japan.

The Chinese server is located in Shanghai and the Japanese server is in Nagano City. To ensure uninterrupted monitoring from these monitoring servers, please make sure your firewalls allow all requests coming with the user agent “Site 24 X 7″.

We will be adding servers in other countries soon, so stay tuned to this space!

Being popular in Web 2.0 world comes with its own share of problems. Twitter, the most popular microblogging service, found this out when they faced security problems on two occasions recently.

The first one was the phishing scam which tricked thousands of tweeters into giving away their account passwords to a phishing site which resembled the Twitter main site. Twitter blog called this the ‘Gone Phishing‘ scam, which now appears to be under control.

The second problem was when some high-profile accounts including that of Barack Obama, Britney Spears, etc were compromised and fake updates posted on their behalf. Twitter status has posted an update about this problem. 

Apparently the hacking was done by an 18-year-old student who gained access some of the tools used by Twitter’s support team. A detailed account of the problem can be found in Twitter blog.

Salesforce.com (CRM) was down for around 30-40 minutes yesterday between 12:40 to 1:20 US Pacific time. Customers complained they were unable to access their accounts or were unable to reach the website in some cases.

Salesforce’s status page had a brief explanation of the outage.

Service Disruption

Time: 1/6/09 12:40 pm PST

Detail: Service Disruption All Instances

Root cause: Starting at 01/06/2009 20:39 UTC, a core network device failed due to memory allocation errors. The failure caused it to stop passing data but did not properly trigger a graceful fail over to the redundant system as the memory allocation errors where present on the failover system as well. This resulted in a full service failure for all instances. Salesforce.com had to initiate manual recovery steps to bring the service back up.
The manual recovery steps was completed at 01/06/2009 21:17 UTC restoring most services except for AP0 and NA31:17 UTC restoring most services except for AP0 and NA3 search indexing. Search of existing data would work but new data would not be indexed for searching.
Emergency maintenance was performed at 01/06/2009 23:24 UTC to restore search indexing for AP0 and NA3 and the implementation of a work-around for the memory allocation error.
While we are confident the root cause has been addressed by the work-around the Salesforce.com technology team will continue to work with hardware vendors to fully detail the root cause and identify if further patching or fixes will be needed.
Further updates will be available as the work progresses.

The event has attracted lots of coverage on the net and also triggered discussions on the downside of using remote services. Just goes to re-inforce the fact that 100% uptime is practically impossible, even for the top-level SaaS players!

We came across a couple of articles on the internet which feature Site24×7. The first one is by Prem Godara in his Techno Mirror blog.  He has an article about finding out what increases the loading time of a website. The article is titled “Does your website load slowly! Here’s a solution” Prem mentions two tools - Site24×7 and Octagate Site Timer.

Here are a few excerpts from the post:

Are you one of those users whose website takes lot of time to load but don’t know what is the problem and which component of the website is taking too much time to load.

Generally, several components of a web page (like Iframes, Flash, Javascript, Images, CSS,) can increase the page loading time but it is very hard to pinpoint the exact culprit that decreases the speed of the site. A normal HTML web page may have advertising scripts, YouTube videos, images and so on.

I came across two online services which can help you by pinpointing as which component of your website is taking too much of time to load.

One such service is Site24×7. Site24×7 is a hosted website monitoring service that helps webmasters ensure their websites are up and running at peak performance. The Site24×7 servers sends out HTTP or HTTPS request to your website at regular intervals of time and alerts you if it is down.

This service is available both as free and premium version. In premium version, you get some advanced features such as monitoring DNS/email servers, online web applications and so on.

Thanks for writing about Site24×7, Prem!

As Prem mentioned in his blog, there are 2 ways through which a user can find which component is increasing the site loading time. One is the Analyze Web page tool and the second is the Web Page Analyzer monitor.

The second article which we want to bring to your attention today is one in the Free Pedia website titled ‘Monitor your Site Up and Down Status‘. This article provides brief information about Site24×7’s website monitoring service.

Few excerpts:

Site24×7 is a simple hosted web site monitoring service that works around the clock making sure that websites are performing flawlessly.

You can set a threshold for a web page such that - if the page load time of that page is more than 3 seconds, you should be notified through EMail, SMS and RSS.

Thanks for writing about us, guys!

Do you manage websites belonging to multiple companies? Do you need to keep tabs on the uptime and performance of websites on a company-wise basis? The “monitor group” feature in Site24×7 will allow you to do just that.

The monitor group lets you organize or group multiple monitors into a group. You can use this to tag different websites or servers belonging to a particular client/company into a single group. If you have multiple clients, you can create multiple groups.

A Sample Monitor Group

The advantage with this is you get group-wise downtime and performance reports, so you know exactly how your client is performing.

Group-wise Performance Reports

Setting up a monitor group is very easy. Just click the ‘Monitor Group’ link to open up a wizard from where  you can select the monitors to be part of the group.

The monitor group feature will be very useful for managed service providers who monitor web sites and servers belonging to multiple clients. This is available in the recently-launched Site24×7 Enterprise Account.

What is your take on the monitor group feature? Do let us know your feedback!

Google yesterday announced their Chrome browser has come out of Beta. This is one of the fastest Google services to come out of beta tag. It has taken just over 3 months while some of the other Google services seem to be in Beta phase for a very long time. For example, Gmail is still in Beta even though it was launched in 2004.

Google claims to have improved Chrome’s security and stability features as well as increased its speed. Now we believe this is going to be more of a competition to Internet Explorer than Firefox. Firefox has its own fiercely loyal set of users who will not switch to any other browser. The same cannot be said of IE users. We, at site24×7, have seen an increase in the number of users accessing Site24×7 through Chrome browser.

Below is a snapshot of visitors stats to www.site24×7.com in June 2008. As you can see, close to 49% of visitors used Internet Explorer whereas around 46% used Firefox.

Cut back to Nov 2008 and this is what you see.

Internet Explorer has gone down to second place with 43% visits. Firefox has managed to retain the percentage of visits. Chrome has suddenly come to third in the list with close to 5% visitors. So at least in Site24×7’s case, we can say Chrome has eaten into IE’s share.

We should add that these stats does not reflect the overall browser market share in anyway. IE is still the leader by a huge margin. Its just that Site24×7’s website monitoring service caters to a more techie crowd who are more likely to use new browsers such as Chrome or the developer-friendly Firefox to access Site24×7.  And now with Chrome stepping out of Beta, these numbers might increase further.

On Thursday, November 27th, Site24×7 will be unavailable from approximately 06:40 hrs GMT to 08:40 hrs GMT due to system maintenance. You won’t be able to log into your accounts during this time. However, your websites will continue to be monitored as usual.

Sorry for the short notice and apologies for the inconvenience caused.

Update: The maintenance is complete. You will be able to access your accounts now.