Site24×7 Blogs

Author: Arun

Mashable, the popular social networking news site, recently had a post titled “13 Free and Cheap Website Monitoring Services“. The post mentioned some of the popular website monitoring services today, a list which also included Site24×7.

This is what the folks at Mashable had to say about Site24×7:

Site24×7 - It is free to monitor two URLs that are polled every 60 minutes. This is another service that allows you to create maintenance windows for your server. The premium plans also offer reasonable prices for various levels of monitoring.

Thank you for writing about us, Mashable!

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.

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.

Microsoft released a new public beta of Internet Explorer browser yesterday. It is called IE 8 Beta 1 and is said to be primarily targeted at web developers and designers. The new update seems to have improved security features as well as usability enhancements. It is also faster than previous IE versions.

Source: IE Blog

Two interesting new features in IE 8 are Activities and webslices. Activities are services that give quick access to external services from a web page. Webslices enables users to subscribe to content directly within a web page without going in for RSS feeds. Users receive notifications when the page content changes.

We installed IE 8 Beta 1 on a Windows Xp SP2 system and it seems to be an improvement over IE7. It is too early to judge anything now and we will get to hear more about IE8 in the coming days.

Of course, we couldn’t resist checking out how Site24×7 looks like on IE 8 and it seems to be working well.

Author: Arun

As we come to the end of year 2007, we thought it might be an appropriate time to look at what we’ve done this year and how far we have come. So here is a quick recap of the year gone by.

Site24×7 was a Beta service for the first 2 months of the year. We came out of Beta in March and introduced our paid plan (Professional account). Our GA release got good coverage in the blogosphere. Throughout this year, we introduced a slew of new features as well as enhancements to existing features based on user feedback. Here is a look at some of those:

• Checks from multiple locations
• Option to buy SMS packs
• DNS Server monitor to monitor domain name servers
• Mail server monitor to monitor both SMTP and pop servers and measure email round-trip time
• Web Page Analyzer to monitor websites from an end-user perspective.
• Free online webmaster tools such as Test Availability, Find IP, Find Location, DNS Lookup, Analyze Web Page
• An enhanced ‘Reports’ section with an option to ‘export reports into CSV’ files.
• Uptime stats broken down by the hour of the day.
• Maintenance schedules, bulk import of urls, and more.

Towards the end of 2007, we introduced a special 40% discount offer. This offer will continue well into the first couple of weeks of the new year.

Thank you all for the continuous support. Thank you for all the coverage. We promise to keep improving and to keep introducing new features/enhancements in the coming year as well.

Author: Arun

Just thought of sharing some feedback we received recently. The first one is from Christian Markley of THP, a long-term user of Site24×7.

“Site24×7 has been an invaluable tool to help me stay on top off my websites’ downtimes and problems. The notifications have come at the same time that I would get notifications from my web server. This service is awesome!”

Kerem of hostcini had this one to say:

“What can i say i don’t know? I’m using only 5 minutes to site24×7.com . I love it , i like it .
Thanks for development team.”

Thanks for your nice words, Christian and Kerem!

You can read more such user testimonials here.

Author: Arun

The holiday shopping season in the US brings in lots of traffic to online stores every year. This year has been no different either. Unfortunately, online stores who had their e-commerce solutions hosted through Yahoo Store found their shopping carts going down at the wrong time, on “Cyber-Monday“. Needless to say, online sales were affected.

The problem was identified to be with the checkout process in Yahoo’s shopping and transaction algorithm. It looks like lots of merchants were affected by this melt-down, judging by discussions going on in webmaster forums.

CNBC has good coverage of the problem here. You can also check the status of this problem from Yahoo small business site.

This incident just goes to show that even giants such as Yahoo are not immune from online store availability problems. For online store owners, it is always a good idea to proactively monitor the uptime and performance of their online shopping carts with a web site monitoring service such as Site24×7.

The web application monitor feature in Site24×7 can be used to record any sequence of urls in an online shopping cart such as logging into a shopping cart, adding items to a cart, checkout, etc. Site24×7 will then keep simulating these steps at periodic intervals of time, scanning for any signs of trouble. If any errors are detected, email/SMS/RSS notifications are immediately sent and you can take corrective actions before your customers are affected.

Author: Arun

In an effort to reduce energy consumption in data centers, SunMicrosystems is planning to lower their Blackbox into an underground coal mine in Japan. The main advantage with this underground data center is of course less energy consumption than the usual ground-level data center.

Excerpts from a Techworld article:

The coolant will be ground water and the site’s temperature is a constant 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit) all year, meaning no air-conditioning will be needed outside the containers. This reduces the energy required for the water chillers, used with surface-level Blackbox containers.

The containers will be lowered 100m into the mine and linked to power, water cooling and network lines via external connectors.

Such a subterranean data center will be easier to secure against unauthorized entry and terrorist attacks. The Blackbox containers are robust enough to withstand earthquakes, being capable of withstanding a quake of magnitude 6.7 on the Richter scale.

This underground data center is said to be very secure. Earthquakes cannot affect it. There won’t be any wayward truck drivers taking down the datacenter, for sure!

Read full article here.

Author: Arun

Datacenter problems can lead to unexpected downtimes and can in turn affect your reputation badly. Web hosting provider Navisite found this out recently when they had a datacenter consolidation project that went horribly wrong. They encountered unexpected problems during server migration between their datacenters. This resulted in lots of their clients’ websites going offline. Some of these sites were down for around six or more days!!

No wonder then, Navisite users were a furious lot. Their anger is understandable since no one would want their sites to be down for such a lengthy period of time.

From a Techworld report,

The length of the outages prompted some NaviSite clients to vow in forum postings that they would switch to other hosting vendors once they could retrieve their data.

Others threatened class-action lawsuits, and New York-based law firm Wolf Popper LLP confirmed that it was looking into possible legal action after being contacted by NaviSite clients.

To their credit though, Navisite have restored around 90% of websites.

Techworld has full coverage of the problem here.

This incident is yet another proof that website uptime cannot be taken for granted. Even leading web hosts with very good infrastructure such as Navisite can have problems. It is always better to monitor your web sites with an external web site monitoring service and get notified when there are problems with your sites.