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.

Most customers opt to purchase Site24x7 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.

Firefox users might be interested in this. Here is a simple trick that lets you view your Site24x7 downtime and trouble notifications within Firefox itself, in the Firefox sidebar.

Prerequisite: You have to subscribe to Site24x7 RSS feed in Google Reader Below are the steps to view your alerts in Firefox sidebar:

1. Subscribe for a RSS alert from Site24x7. Login to your Site24x7 account, navigate to 'Alerts' tab and select the RSS link.
2. Login to your Google Reader account and subscribe to the Site24x7 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 Site24x7 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 Site24x7 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 Site24x7'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 launched Site24x7 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 Site24x7 Premium account? You get all the features of the Site24x7 Standard account (earlier known as Site24x7 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.

In some of our earlier blog posts, we'd answered some common questions pertaining to various sections of Site24x7 such as the Reports tab, Alerts etc. Today we will discuss questions related to the usage of Site24x7 login names. Of course, these questions are the most frequently asked ones. If you have anything specific, you know whom to ask!! I signed up using an email address but that domain will last for 1 month only. How can I change my login email address to something else? Changing the login email address cannot be done from the UI. It has to be done by us on the backend side. Please contact our support team with your current login email address and the new one. They will change it manually and update you. I forgot my password. How can I reset it? You can reset the password using the 'Forgot Password' link in the website. Just click this link and it will open up a new window. Enter your site24x7 login email id and your new password will be emailed to you. Where can I change my password? You can change the password under Account->Change Password tab inside your account. Login to your Site24x7 account, navigate to 'Account->Change Password' tab, enter your old and new passwords and click 'Update'.

Author: Arun Most Site24x7 users who upgrade to the Professional account do so by paying online through credit card. In fact, we have even mentioned in our website that this is our preferred mode of payment since credit cards are handled automatically. However, there are some users who might not want to use a credit card as their company policies might prevent them from using cards. It is for the benefit of these users that we offer two alternate modes of payment - Purchase Order (PO) method and Paypal method. This article explains more about how to purchase Site24x7 with a PO or a Paypal account. Purchase Order In this method, you have to mail us a Purchase Order showing the total amount you want to buy, etc. Based on this, we will upgrade your Site24x7 account to Professional and also add the required monitoring credits to your account. Our invoice department will then send you an invoice through email. Upon receiving the invoice, you have to pay us within 30 days either through credit card, bank cheque or wire transfer. Paypal As is the case with PO mechanism, you have to mail us a price quote showing the amount you want to buy plus other details. We will then generate and send you a secure payment link where you can login and pay through your Paypal account. Once the payment is made, your account will be upgraded to Professional and the necessary monitoring credits will be added to your account. This article for more info on Paypal support. Both these modes of payment require you to send us the below information to help us process the payment:

• Your company name & billing address.
• Your Site24x7 account name.
• Number of monitors you want to purchase, type of monitors (i.e. website/web application/DNS/SMTP/WPA), and their monitoring intervals.
• SMS Packs, (if any)
• Total amount you want to purchase.
• Your method of payment : Paypal / Purchase Order.
• Payment period - Annual

There are 3 things to be noted if you opt for any of these payment modes. #1 - The payment you make does not renew automatically like it happens with the credit card payment. So once your monitoring credits get used up, you have to buy again to keep the monitoring going. #2 - The payment period will always be 'Annual'. #3- The Site24x7 client provides you the option to pay through credit card. For PO and Purchase Order payments, you need to contact our support team with the details described above to initiate the payment. Believe this article answers some of your queries on paying through Paypal and Purchase Order. Do contact our support team for any further queries. Note: Updated for clarity

Author: Arun In an earlier blog post, we had answered some common questions with regards to the Site24x7 free account. Today, we would like to answer some recent questions related to the alerts & reports section. I'm trying to delete an email and sms contact from the alerts page, but it does nothing. How do I delete someone who has left the company? We do not allow you to delete a contact when it is being used somewhere else. To explain further, if you have associated your email / sms contact with any monitor, we will not allow these contacts to be removed from the 'Alerts' tab as the alerting mechanism for these monitors will be disrupted. If you want to remove these contacts, you have to first remove them from the monitors where they are used. You can do this from 'Edit-->Advanced Configuration' of the corresponding monitors. The same is the case with email contacts used in the Daily/Weekly reports section under 'Accounts' tab. You have to first dissociate these email ids from the Daily/weekly reports section and then delete the contacts from 'Alerts' tab. I would like to get daily reports sent to me and to another email address - how do I set this up? You can set up daily reports from the Accounts tab. Login to your Site24x7 account, navigate to 'Accounts->Reports' tab, enter your email addresses, and select the "Send Daily Report at" option. You can also specify the time at which the daily report needs to be sent. Click 'Update' button after this to confim your settings. Do you have any other queries with regards to the Alerts section? Reply through your comments here or contact our support team.