Site24×7 Blogs

Author: Arun

Most customers opt to purchase Site24×7 online using their credit card. This is because credit card subscriptions renew automatically and the user does not have to go through the purchase process again. So if you have opted for a credit card mode of payment, this article might be useful for you.

On some occasions, your credit card payments may be declined because our billing system is unable to verify the billing information you’ve submitted. The most possible cause for this is the credit card info you submitted does not match with the one in the bank. Some portion of your credit card info such as the street number or zip code for example, might have changed since you entered it into our system. Whenever any payment is declined, an email will be sent to your login email id notifying you of the problem and asking you to update your card details. Once you receive this mail, we suggest you to update your credit card info in your account so that your monitoring is not affected.

To update your credit card info, please follow the steps below:

1. Login to your account.
2. Go to Account->Billing tab.
3. Click Modify Card Details link as shown in the image below. A pop up window opens up.
4. Enter your updated billing information
5. Click Update once you’re finished.

Once you’ve updated your credit card info, your payment will be accepted automatically during your next billing cycle.

Last week, Comcast.net users had nearly 1.5 hours blackout of their email services. It was inaccessible from 11 PM to 30 minutes past midnight. As per CIO, hackers changed the DNS Server records to point to alternate servers and hence Comcast.net users were unable to check their mails.

If an organization’s DNS servers are down or not functioning properly, it will lead to problems for the end users. This just goes to show how important it is to have your DNS Records monitored too, just to make sure your users as well as your brand identity are not affected.

Firefox users might be interested in this. Here is a simple trick that lets you view your Site24×7 downtime and trouble notifications within Firefox itself, in the Firefox sidebar.

Prerequisite: You have to subscribe to Site24×7 RSS feed in Google Reader

Below are the steps to view your alerts in Firefox sidebar:

1. Subscribe for a RSS alert from Site24×7. Login to your Site24×7 account, navigate to ‘Alerts’ tab and select the RSS link.
2. Login to your Google Reader account and subscribe to the Site24×7 feed.
3. Open the Bookmarks manager in Firefox browser (Bookmarks/Organize bookmarks)
4. If you are using Firefox 2, select ‘New Bookmark’ in the ‘File’ menu. If using Firefox 3, select ‘Organize’ in the toolbar and select ‘New Bookmark’.
5. Enter a name, http://www.google.com/reader/i/ for location, and ensure to check Load this bookmark in the sidebar.
6. Press Save Changes. Now you can select the bookmark to load Google Reader in the Firefox sidebar and view your Site24×7 alerts.

This trick was partly inspired by this post in MozillaLinks. Stay tuned for similar tricks in our future posts!

Earlier this month, we’d answered some questions about the Site24×7 Premium account here in this blog. Today, we will discuss another set of questions and their answers here for the benefit of our readers.

How many monitoring locations are available for the Premium account? Where are these locations?

With the Premium account, you can monitor your website uptime from up to 6 different geographical locations. These locations include California, Houston, New Jersey, Netherlands, UK, and Singapore.

Where do I specify the monitoring locations for my website?

You can either specify the monitoring locations while creating a new website monitor or edit the monitor and specify monitoring locations later on.

What are primary and secondary locations?

A primary location is the monitoring server from which Site24×7’s monitoring checks will be send to your website as per the monitoring interval configured. When a website check from the primary location fails, the sites will be checked again from the secondary locations before downtime is reported.

For example, assume you have selected California as your primary location and Singapore and Netherlands as the secondary locations. The monitoring interval specified is 5 minutes. Your website will now be monitored from the California location every 5 minutes. If a website check from California fails, the website will be rechecked from Singapore and Netherlands locations also.

This concludes part 2 of this series. Stay tuned for more answers to common questions in our future posts. If any of your questions have not been covered here, feel free to visit the FAQ section of our website or contact our support.

We came across quite a few articles and blog posts about Site24×7 in recent times. Just wanted to share some of these articles with our readers.

The first article was found in blog.econsultant.com last week. This one has a pretty simplistic style. It is in a ‘problem definition and solution’ format.

A rather straightforward solution, isn’t it? Just a couple of lines and an image, but they do convey a lot.

Read full article here.

Another article mentions about the Web Page analyzer tool of Site24×7. This one is in French and below is an excerpt of the same.

The article basically mentions about the WPA as an online tool to calculate the loading time of different objects on a website.

Read full article here.

Thank you for writing about us, guys!

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes images convey much more than words. That’s why we have decided to keep the words to the minimum and focus more on images in this post.

Well here are a few images of our newly launched Premium account. Basically, these images depict the steps involved in monitoring website uptime from multiple geographical locations. We believe these images showcase the true value of Premium account.

1) Creating a website monitor and selecting monitoring locations

2) The dashboard - for a quick view of vital website stats

3) Uptime stats from 6 geographically separate locations

4) Downtime reports from top 5 locations

5) View how your website responds from different parts of the world

Apart from all these, you get more out of our Reports section as well, but thats for another post.

We launched Site24×7 Premium account a few days ago and the feedback has been good so far. We’ve also received quite a few questions about the Premium account from our users. Just posting some of these questions and their answers here in our blog for the benefit of other users.

What do I get out of the Site24×7 Premium account?

You get all the features of the Site24×7 Standard account (earlier known as Site24×7 Professional account) plus the ability to monitor the uptime of your websites from up to 6 different worldwide locations. This will help you ensure your websites are up and accessible from different parts of the world.

You also get uptime & outage reports and response time stats from multiple locations.

How is the Premium account different from the Standard account?

The Standard account lets you monitor your site uptime from only 1 monitoring location (California). If a check from California fails, rechecks are done from 3 randomly selected secondary locations before reporting downtime.

The Premium account supports all the features of the Standard account plus the option to monitor website uptime from up to 6 geographically separate locations.

For more info, refer our comparison chart.

How much does it cost to add the extra locations?

Each additional monitoring location costs USD 2 per month.

I’m currently using the Standard account. Can I upgrade to the Premium account?

Yes. Simply login to your account, click the “Upgrade” link and select Premium account.

We’d introduced website monitoring from multiple locations in Site24×7 quite a while ago. Now with our most recent update, we have enhanced our multi-location monitoring capabilities and expanded our monitoring network to make it more global in nature.

We have added monitoring servers in 4 new locations across the globe - two in the US, and one each in Asia and Europe. These along with our existing monitoring locations in California and UK take our location count to 6.

Our global monitoring network

Listed below are our current active monitoring locations and their ip addresses. To ensure uninterrupted monitoring from all these locations, please make sure your firewalls allow these ip addresses.

California (72.5.250.84)
Houston (75.125.250.20)
New Jersey (66.246.218.186)
UK (91.186.0.4)
Netherlands (84.244.138.41, 84.244.138.42, 84.244.138.43, 84.244.138.44)
Singapore (203.211.133.45)

Earlier, the bulk of the monitoring used to be done from our primary location (California) and only rechecks were done from secondary locations. Now, you can specify the locations from which your website needs to be monitored (available in Premium Account). For example, if most of the visitors to your site are from US & Europe, you may configure monitoring from US and Europe. This way you can be sure that your websites are up and available to people who matter the most to your business.

Note: We currently monitor only the uptime of websites from different locations. Other monitor types such as Web Application monitor, Web Page Analyzer, Email Server, DNS server monitor, etc. are monitored from a single location only (California). Over the course of time, multi-location monitoring support will be extended to other monitor categories also.

What is your take on our newly enhanced monitoring network? Pour in your feedback!

We rolled out some important features in Site24×7 a couple of days ago. Here are a few highlights of this update:

More Monitoring Locations

We have added four new monitoring locations to go with the existing two locations. That makes it six monitoring locations in total - California, Houston, New Jersey, Netherlands, UK and Singapore.

By monitoring website uptime from these different geographical locations, you can be doubly sure that your sites are accessible from all parts of the world. We also have plans to add more locations to our monitoring network in the near future.

New user packages

We have introduced 2 new user packages - Standard and Premium accounts. The Standard account retains the same features of our Professional account and is suited for small businesses. The Premium account has all the features of Standard account plus the ability to monitor website uptime from multiple secondary monitoring locations which are geographically separate. This makes the Premium account an ideal fit for small & medium businesses wanting to make sure their web sites are up and accessible from different parts of the world.

Read more about our user packages.

Other enhancements in this update include an enhanced reports section, a ‘Test SMS’ option which enables you to send test sms messages to your mobile from Site24×7, enhancements to the web application monitor section, an improved ‘Upgrade’ screen, etc.

Do try out the new features/enhancements in Site24×7 and as always, we will be glad to hear your feedback!

We are enhancing our monitoring network by adding more monitoring locations. For this purpose,Site24×7 will be down for an update on Mar 25, 2008 between 05:30 hrs GMT to 10:30 hrs GMT . You will not be able to access Site24×7 during this time.

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

Update: Due to unforeseen issues, we are extending the maintenance period by another 4 hours. We will be back online by 14:30 hrs GMT

Update: We are back online now. Thanks for all your support.

In this update, we have added some useful new features into Site24×7 and revamped our website as well. Do visit http://site24×7.com for more info. We will give more details about this update in another blog post.