Site24x7 - Website Monitoring Service

SMS Alert Problem for US Customers

Mar 04 2010 06:27:47 AM Posted By : Raghavan
Comments (0)
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 updates go live on Google search

Feb 19 2010 12:01:46 AM Posted By : Arun
Comments (0)

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.

Happy Holidays from Site24x7

Dec 31 2009 06:12:49 AM Posted By : Arun
Comments (0)

It has been an exciting and eventful year for us here at Site24x7. We grew a lot this year, both in terms of features added to our monitoring service as well as expanding our user base. Here is a quick recap of what went into Site24x7 in 2009.

- Five new locations were added to our global monitoring network. Servers were added in China, Japan, India, Brazil and Sweden.
- Support for 10 new languages including French, German, Spanish, Chinese Simplified, Japanese, etc.
- New monitor types such as POP, Port, SMTP.
- REST APIs for developers.
- Enhanced SLA monitoring capabilities
- Major enhancements to website monitor including 3-minute monitoring intervals, option to mark trouble as downtime and downtime as maintenance, etc.
- Reseller programs for businesses.
- iPhone client
- Uptime buttons to help webmasters showcase the uptime of their websites, and more.

We want to thank you for your fantastic support throughout 2009. We promise to keep improving and to keep introducing new features/enhancements in the coming year as well.

Happy holidays and a prosperous new year!

As you must have known by now, Twitter was recently hacked and defaced by a group claiming to be the Iranian Cyber Army. The hackers managed to compromise Twitter's DNS records and left a defacement message on the website. Both twitter.com and status.twitter.com were down and some users faced a temporary problem with sending tweets. There has been extensive coverage of this downtime in various tech blogs such as Techcrunch.

The Twitter status page provides the latest updates on this incident:


 We are working to recovery from an unplanned downtime and will update more as we learn the cause of this outage.

Update (11:28p): Twitter’s DNS records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed. We are looking into the underlying cause and will update with more information soon

This hacking, although lasting only for a short duration of time, did manage to garner attention.

Now if this can happen to the best of services, it can happen to your site as well. In most cases, hackers have political intentions and they leave politically motivated messages on the site as in the recent Twitter example, or alter the content of the site. If your website encounters such a problem, you can set up website content monitoring to be aware of the problem before it affects your website visitors/customers.

On some occasions, hackers manage to gain access to your DNS records and make them point to alternate sites. If you are monitoring DNS records, you can instantly become aware of this problem and rectify it quickly.

For webmasters and website owners, it does make sense to follow the relevant security guidelines and best practices to keep the hackers at bay. Even then, hackers do manage to break through even the toughest security controls and gain access. The least a webmaster can do is to use a good website monitoring service such as Site24x7 (shameless plug) to continuously monitor websites for any defacement!

China monitoring location temporarily unavailable

Dec 10 2009 05:13:58 AM Posted By : Arun
Comments (0)

Our Chinese monitoring location has been temporarily rendered out of service. This is due to an unprecedented disruption of network activity at the datacenter level, and this reportedly affects tens of thousands of websites. You can read more info on this downtime from our web host's blog:

http://blog.sinohosting.net/china-servers-downtime-notice/

In order to ensure our China location users are not affected, we have routed the monitoring to our Japan server. All users who have configured China as their primary monitoring location will now have their monitoring checks coming from Japan.

We thank you for your understanding and regret the inconvenience caused. We will be shifting the monitoring to China as soon as the connection is restored.

What do you think is the fastest growing domain name on the internet? It is the Chinese (.cn) domain.  As the Chinese economy is growing, so is the number of internet users in China. In fact, the number of Internet users in China surpassed the US in 2008.

According to CNNIC, there were 298 million Chinese Internet users by end of 2008 and growing at 800,000 new users per day. It is currently 22% of Internet users worldwide, and could surpass Internet users in Europe very soon. This is to say the least an impressive growth rate.

Also, there is a new top level domain that will be offered to users. (.China) will solely consist of Chinese characters. Until now China has had to settle for .cn, which is incomprehensible to the typical Chinese Internet user.

.cn is today the largest ccTLD and the 2nd most registered top level domain after .com with almost 17 million registrations. Since CNNIC has made it very easy to register .cn domain names, .china is expected to have similar regulations. So it can be expected that the new top level domain will surpass .cn inside 2-5 years after launch, and .cn will only serve for users using Latin characters.

Analysts are predicting there is enormous potential investing in .china domains, so the future is bound to be interesting!

The increasing patronage of Digital Passports

Sep 28 2009 02:36:26 AM Posted By : Arun
Comments (0)

Zdnetasia recently reported that Indian government has announced plans to introduce digital passports to its citizens from 2010 onwards.  We decided to take a closer look at what digital passports are and how they are implemented around the world.

What is a digital passport?

A digital passport, also called biometric passport or e-passport is the same as the traditional passport with the addition of a small integrated circuit or chip embedded in the back cover. The passport contains a microchip which contains the same information as on the picture page and a biometric photograph in addition to a machine readable zone. The chip is based on the "WORM" technology which stands for "Write Once, Read Many". These passports are designed to be harder to forge and to identify the bearer more securely.

The e-passport has been implemented in around 70 countries in the world. Most European union countries had introduced e-passports around the 2004-05 time frame. In the UK, the digital passport has been issued since February 2006.

Controversies

It has not been smooth sailing for digital passports from their inception. They've had their share of controversies too. There have been some protests in the past about the privacy of the bearer. Activists in many countries have questioned the lack of information about what exactly the passport's chips will contain.  When the e-passport was introduced in the United States, there was criticism against the usage of RFID in the chips. Privacy activists were claiming that the signals from the chip were not encrypted and can be easily intercepted, thus jeopardizing the privacy of the bearer. Just a few days ago, human rights campaigners in Netherlands were up in arms against the government policy of storing fingerprints taken from passports on to national database.

In spite of all the opposition, more and more governments are keen on issuing digital passports to their citizens. This is because it has the potential to bring down passport forgery thereby improving the security aspect as well as it is easier to maintain than traditional passports. So the coming years should see most European Union and Asian countries actively embracing this RFID-based technology.

Follow Site24x7 on Twitter

Sep 16 2009 01:58:32 AM Posted By : Arun
Comments (0)
Twitter has been taking over the world and many companies now use it as a platform to interact with their users. We, the Site24x7 team, have also been using Twitter to reach out to our users in near real time. You may follow our tweets to get regular updates on new features/enhancements in Site24x7 or to get your Site24x7 questions answered.

Follow us on Twitter

This is another method of interacting with us. Of course, you can also follow this feed for updates or reach out to us directly.  
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 CRM experiences sudden downtime

Jan 07 2009 05:53:32 AM Posted By : Arun
Comments (0)
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!