General | The Official Blog of Site24x7 - Website Monitoring Service

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:

Attention Span of the User
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.

Results of Web Page Analyzer for a web application: ZOHO Writer

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.

In a couple of previous blog posts , I showed you how to add multiple locations for a new website monitor. The advantage of using multi-location is to get first-hand information on how well your website or web-based application performs in front of a worldwide audience. In this blog post, I shall demonstrate how to monitor your current website from multiple locations.

1. Log into Site24x7.

2. Select the website you wish add more locations or change those locations to a different one and click on 'Edit Details' link.

3. Under 'Secondary Location' option chose the locations you wish to monitor your website.

Select Secondary Location

4. Click on 'Update' button at the bottom of the page and then presto! - You have added new locations to your website monitor.

Now, if you go back to the particular monitor for which you added new locations, it will display updated global status of your website from those locations.

Updated Global Status

Availability and Response Time of Global Locations

You can further drill-down by clicking on each location response time. You can either email this report to yourself or download it in CSV format.

So, if you plan on monitoring your website from different locations, here's how you do it. Wanna try? Head to Site24x7 and start monitoring. If you do not have an account, it is pretty simple to sign up as well!

We are going to roll out a new user interface (UI) for Site24x7 shortly, which represents the first significant change to the interface since it was launched. We have made improvements to overall usability & accessibility and have updated colors and styles to match the Site24x7 website theme.

This update helps you to quickly access all features, data and statistics. It will be more intuitive, visual-friendly, easier to use and load faster.

A sneak-peek of the new interface can be seen below.

The new Site24x7 UI update will be rolled out to all Site24x7 users in a couple of weeks, so stay tuned.

When users search for a good website monitoring solution, one of the points in their checklist is whether the solution can monitor websites from multiple locations. This not only allows them to understand the availability and performance of their website, but also look at the end-user experience of their website from around the world. They enables them to fine tune the performance of their website based on availability and response time reports.

In this blog post, I will quickly run through the steps how to monitor a website and enable monitoring from multiple locations.

Adding multi-location monitoring for new websites :

Log into Site24x7 or if you do not have access, create an account now.

Click on 'New Monitor' pull-down menu, and select 'Website'.

Enter the label of the website, its address, whether you would like to associate this website with a monitor group. Select the frequency of the website you wish to monitor, the timeout, the default primary location. You can set the polling interval as low as 1 minute to as high as 60 minutes or more.

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.

As the load on our Chicago server is growing, we are moving our monitoring to a new high end server from 27 July 2010 00:00 AM PDT.

So, if you have IP restriction in your server, you have to reconfigure the newer Chicago server ip address in the allowed ip list. This is to make sure that our requests come through properly.

The new ip addresses of our Chicago server is:

184.106.199.87

Kindly make the necessary configuration changes to ensure our monitoring requests hit your websites.

We’ve recently introduced monitoring from Italy, Hongkong and Sao Paulo. These additions further augment our global monitoring network and takes the total location count to 24. The Italy server is our 8th in Europe, Sao Paulo server is our 2nd server in South America and Hongkong is our 4th server in Asia.

We are also planning to add more servers in near future, so stay tuned to this space.

We’ve recently introduced monitoring servers in Virginia, Ireland and France. The Virginia and Ireland servers are from Amazon EC2 and our France server is located in Paris. These additions further augment our global monitoring network and takes the total location count to 20. The Virginia server is our 7th server in US. Ireland and France servers take our European server count to 6.

We are also planning to add more servers in near future, so stay tuned to this space.

Analyst firm Hitwise reported that Facebook has overtaken Google to become the #1 website in the US. According to Hitwise, Facebook surpassed Google in terms of traffic for the week ending March 13, 2010.

Although FaceBook and Google serve two different purposes, this is a significant development in the Internet world. For quite a long time, Google was, without a doubt, the most visited site around the world. It still continues to attract humongous traffic. However, with more and more people flocking to social networking sites such as Facebook, we are witnessing a shift in the average web user’s usage patterns.

Even Google acknowledged this recently. Here is an excerpt from the 'Competition' section of Google’s latest SEC filing:

Social networks, such as Facebook, Yelp, or Twitter. Some users are relying more on social networks for product or service referrals, rather than seeking information through traditional search engines

So it is true that a percentage of traffic to search engines is getting diverted to social networks. If you are searching for information on the net, you are more likely to visit a site which your friend or follower has recommended rather than rely on search engines. We have seen customers finding us through our Twitter account, for example.

Another contributing factor behind FaceBook’s growth could be the ultra-popular Farmville series of social games. I personally know many people who are addicted to Farmville and other social games on Facebook.

Will Facebook continue to rank over Google in terms of traffic? With Google coming up with Google Buzz to take on Facebook, it should be an interesting few months ahead of us.

We are using clickatell gateway for delivering SMS alerts to our users. Currently there is a problem in clickatell gateway for delivering SMS to US numbers.

We are hoping this problem will be resolved soon. Updates on the same is available at http://support.clickatell.com/us_notifications.php

If you have mail-to-sms provision with your service provider, you can use the same to get SMS alerts.

We apologize for the inconvenience caused. We will update you once the problem is resolved.

MySpace, the social networking site, has been lying low for a while. Once the top social networking site in the world, MySpace has seen Facebook and later Twitter overtake them in terms of popularity and number of users. While there may be many reasons for the downfall of Myspace, they are certainly trying to be back in the reckoning now. This can be evidenced from MySpace's co-president Mike Jones's recent blog post that Myspace results will appear as part of Google search results.

Here are a few excerpts from the blog :

In December, Google announced plans to implement the MySpace Real-Time Search API, which would push publicly available updates from our users to Google in real-time. The implementation is now LIVE on Google and we couldn't be more excited to be the first social networking platform to light up real-time integration with Google.

Beginning today, when you search for anything on Google, as part of your search results you will see live updates from MySpace users, including news, photos, and blog posts that they have chosen to publically publish. Further, all of these updates will be ranked to reflect the freshest, most relevant results, making it easier to find the latest information on anything you're searching for on Google, including the music and artists you enjoy most.

This could well be the stimulus that MySpace so desperately needed to fight against the Facebooks and the Twitters of the world. Will they regain their lost glory? It should be an interesting few months ahead of us.

Analyze and Improve Website Performance using Web Page Analyzer Tool

Attention Span of the User

Google Effect

Updating an Existing Website Monitor to Add More Locations

New look & feel for Site24x7 - lots more to come!

How-To: Monitor website performance from Multiple Locations

Adding multi-location monitoring for new websites :

IP address change in Chicago monitoring servers

Introducing Web site Monitoring from Italy, Hongkong and Sao Paulo

Introducing Web site Monitoring from France, Ireland and Virginia

Facebook becomes most visited website in the US

SMS Alert Problem for US Customers

Myspace updates go live on Google search