One of the recent trends I have noticed over a period of time is that many websites and web-based applications have started obsessing about their website performance and uptime. In order to understand this obsession better, I think we need to look at two key factors:

1. Attention Span of the User
2. Google Effect

Attention Span of the User

Many theories and scientific studies have been conducted on how data is being delivered to us via Internet and how it has changed the way we search and assimilate information. To put this in simpler terms, Google has made us think differently. Due to this powerful search engine, data is made easy to find and simpler to deliver.

As a result, readers have started losing patience when information is not readily available or readable. This in-ability of readers/users to hold attention in a specific website/application has started to drive the need for quicker and cleaner websites.

Website designers and developers not only design it to get the aesthetic part correctly, but also try to ensure that it loads quickly and smoothly as a result. Gone are the days when the user would have to wait for the entire website to load. In today’s high speed network world, if a website does not respond within 5 seconds, it is considered as slow and users lose interest.

This is even truer when your website is an e-commerce one. If your web application loads slowly, then users who use the service will be discouraged to return back to your website. This translates to lesser traffic to the website which in turn means lower revenue. To put it simply, if your website is slow, you are out-of-business.

A lot of new programming techniques are also being developed around to ensure to create high performance websites. These techniques enable the developer to easily customize the website to required specifications without affecting its performance.

Google Effect

Google had announced a while back about a change in its search algorithm which indicated that it will now take website loading times into consideration while calculating page rank. This new initiative by Google seems to have spurred web designers and web application developers even more into speed-obsessed frenzy.

Since their announcement, website developers and designers have started testing their website for optimal performance (translated as optimum loading time). This has given rise to the need for a tool which allows them to analyze website performance, understand each component impact on website performance.

Although there are several tools which allows users to that, we understand the inherent need for a comprehensive tool which would help the user to understand how website performance affects uptime. Our Web Page Analyzer tool allows web developers to check the performance of his/her website he/she is developing and find out if their websites are slow. It provides information such the loading time of individual objects (CSS, images, sprite image, JavaScript, etc), page size and the total loading time.


So, if you are designing a website/application and would like to find out how well your website performs, go ahead and use our tool. If you have any feedback, please feel free to use the comment section to post them. Also, if you think there are other factors which contribute to the need for fast loading, high performance websites, do let us know.

Now select the secondary location. These secondary locations will allow you to monitor the website from multiple locations. For this example, I have chosen Sao Paulo, Sweden and Japan. Site24x7 allows you to easily alert you when your website goes down from one of the locations, configured.


Site24x7 also allows you to alert you in case there is a change in content or when the response time of the website increases. In addition, you can also add a host of alerting options such as keyword monitoring, regular expression match, website content modification and response time.


Once every thing is configured, simply click 'Add' and Site24x7 starts monitoring them.


As you can see, Site24x7 starts monitoring not only from its default primary location, but also starts monitoring the website from the multiple locations I have chosen from. So interested in trying out our multi-location feature for monitoring your website? Go ahead and give Site24x7 a try.

Along with our recent iPhone client release, we have also included a couple of enhancements to our downtime reporting feature. Just thought of discussing these in greater detail for the benefit of our readers.

Mark Downtime as Maintenance - Exclude maintenance from Downtime Calculation

Lets just say you had taken your websites offline for some maintenance purpose. You most probably don't want to receive alerts for this scheduled downtime and you will not want this downtime to be reflected in your reports as well. In such a scenario, you can use the "mark downtime as maintenance" option and mark this downtime as maintenance in Site24x7. This will not be considered for downtime calculation and will be displayed separately in the availability chart.

You can specify maintenance period in 2 different ways:

1. Create a Maintenance schedule for the monitor: If you know the maintenance time  beforehand or if the downtime is a recurring event, you can create a maintenance schedule for the time period. Once you create a schedule, the site will be automatically marked as 'under Maintenance' for the timeframe of the schedule.
2. Mark downtime as Maintenance: Lets assume you forgot to configure a maintenance schedule and Site24x7 marked your site as down. However, since you know this is scheduled maintenance and don't really need to consider this as downtime, you can use the "Mark Downtime as Maintenance" option and mark the specific downtime as maintenance. Click the Mark as Maintenance icon from the downtime table in the monitor details page to convert a downtime to maintenance period.

Ability to add your own comments to the downtime

A second enhancement that has been included in our service is the option to specify your own comments for the downtimes. These comments can be anything that reflects the nature of the downtime or the reason for the downtime, etc.

These comments can be made public as well, so your visitors can also know the reason why your site went down.

What is your take on our latest enhancements? Feel free to comment or contact us directly for any questions.

The Wimbledon Final yesterday, was an epic battle between two great Tennis players : Roger Federer Vs Andy Roddick.  The game was exhilarating to say the least. The scores : 5-7 7-6 7-6 3-6 16-14 Last game, 16 - 14 ! That makes it actually a 6 sets match. While watching the match, my mind was just trying to think what was going through the minds of the two players. Both had very powerful serves, both were superbly fit players, played great tennis with huge amount of concentration. However both made surprisingly unusual errors (an eg. mishitting the ball high up and ending with the ball going out). Federer was making it (unforced errors) too frequently all along until the 11th game of the last set. While Andy did it in the last game of the last set. It proved too costly for Andy though. He lost the game and with that the championship. That's how websites too could behave. Even if you have the most powerful servers, you still can have trouble with a few revenue critical web transactions which can affect your bottom-line. These transactions could work fine most of the time, but the few times it misbehaves could cost your dear. Why would these transactions fail ?

• Lots of users coming to your website during peak hours.
• New update made by your development team caused a transaction to fail under certain conditions. Eg: when selecting the option, "Book by ISBN number" the transaction failed.

These failed transactions could even have been high valued transactions. That is why you need to monitor your e-commerce transactions and take corrective actions immediately. Customers visit your website with an intention to make a decision and buy immediately. This means, your website should not only respond quickly but also support the other transactions consistently. With site24x7 Web Application Monitoring capability, you can make sure your e-commerce transactions work as expected. Lets take an example of an Online Book Store. John is a graduate student and looking to buy a book on Economics. He is trying to find the lowest prices offered on the web. John searches for different websites offering this. He tries to open up 5 to 10 sites that got listed in search results for the book he wants. Some of the sites did not load itself, he just closes those browser windows. Narrows down to a few good ones site A and site B.  Site A lists the book for $10 and in Site B its present for $9. He decides to buy from Site B. However Site B was broken when it comes to the step to make the payment when he used the "ISBN number" to buy the book. He goes to the Site A and tries to buy from there. He is successful and was happy it was real quick too. He did not regret paying that extra dollar. Site A won this customer !  Though this transaction is worth just $10, where do you think John will go the next time ? Trust is worth more than just the first transaction. With Site24x7 you can make sure your e-commerce transactions work as advertised. Know more about web application monitoring.

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 Site24x7 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 Site24x7 Enterprise Account.

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

Author: Arun Along with our Enterprise Account release last month, we also added more monitoring locations to our global monitoring network. These locations include Seattle, Chicago & Dallas in the United States, Germany in Europe, Australia, and South Africa in the African continent. This now takes our location count into the double digit figures, its on 12 right now. If you wonder what this means to users, well, it means our users can now monitor the uptime & performance of their business-critical websites from up to 12 different geographical locations, just to make sure their sites are accessible and performing well from across the world. With the addition of new monitoring locations, our monitoring network now has a more global outlook. We have monitoring servers in almost every continent, except for South America. Our South American users, however, need not feel left out. We do have plans to introduce servers in your continent very soon. We've taken care to use only the best hosting providers and hardware in all our monitoring locations. To ensure uninterrupted monitoring from our monitoring servers, please make sure your firewalls allow all requests coming with user agent "Site 24 X 7". More info on our monitoring network here.

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!

Website defacement is any unauthorized access of a website by a hacker or a system cracker. A hacker might break into the web server and create a page of his own. When visitors come to the website, they might get to see a totally different page or it might perform unexpected actions. Typically hackers leave some messages or shoutouts to their friends. Most of the defacements are harmless, but sometimes they can used to cover up something more sinister such as uploading malware or spyware. Webmasters and website owners usually take necessary precautions to ensure their websites do not fall into unauthorized hands. In spite of all these efforts, some malicious hackers do manage to gain unauthorized access to the site. The recent hacking of a UK website is an example. For a webmaster, what's worser than web page defacement is not even knowing about it. Imagine coming to know of it from your users. This is another reason why you should continuously monitor your web pages. It is not enough if you monitor the website's downtime or performance alone. You should keep an eye on website content as well to know if someone has defaced your website. With Site24x7, you can check for the presence or absence of any keywords or phrases on your web page. If any keyword or phrase is available or not available, Site24x7 will alert you. You can also configure Site24x7 to alert you when your website content changes or when your web page is modified. Using our web page defacement monitoring features, you will instantly know when someone has gained access to your website and changed its contents so that you can initiate corrective actions quickly. What do you think of the web page content monitoring features of Site24x7 ? Reply through comments or contact our support team directly.