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Is Your Webpage Optimized to Face
the Holiday Rush?

Better End-user Experience | Halloween Contest Winners | Did You Know?

As the Black Friday and Cyber Monday approaches, your website must be ready to face the holiday rush and be able to deliver results within seconds. In order to deliver better end-user experience, you need to optimize individual webpage performance.

Site24x7 Webpage Analyzer

Site24x7 Webpage Analyzer Monitor

Site24x7 Webpage analyzer , helps you monitor and analyze the performance of your website, component-by-component (such as JavaScript, CSS and images). This tool provides detailed information such as page loading time, connection time, average throughput of sub-domains and the overall availability and performance from multiple geographical locations.

It tracks each webpage component performance and instantly alerts you whenever your website to slows down or becomes unavailable.

Halloween Contest Winners!

We are happy to announce the following winners of our Halloween Contest held between Oct 31st and Nov 14th. The winners are:

Jesse Orosz

Natalie Milner

To know more, visit our Facebook page .

Did You Know?

Make use of Site24x7 content tools and ensure better SEO performance for your website. The list of tools include:

Linx Explorer - Ensures there are no broken links in your website.
Web Speed Report - Ensures how fast your website loads along with page size.
Text Ratio - Tells you the ratio of code to text.
Lynx View - Provides the view the search engine bots sees your webpage.

With the help of these tools, you can check how well your website is optimized for speed, search engine bots and for SEO.

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Tweet this | Website Monitoring Features | Success Stories

Track Website Performance via
Site24x7 Reports

Track Website Performance \| Win an iPod Touch \| Did You Know?

One of the critical aspects of monitoring your website is to know what's happening. With Site24x7 reports , you get access to a wide range of information on the availability and performance of your website. It offers website response time reports, downtime reports, website outage reports, website performance during peak hours (busy hours reports) and trend reports for trend analysis. Site24x7 Website Performance Reporting Armed with specific information of your website performance and availability, such as response time, throughput data, DNS time and Connection time, you can now troubleshoot any performance issue you may encounter before it impacts your visitor.

Win an iPod Touch this Halloween!
Be ready to grab one of the two new iPod Touch giveaway contest this Halloween! All you have to do is to upload snaps of yourself or your family in their best Halloween costumes in Site24x7 Facebook Page. The two best snaps will win an iPod Touch each. Of course, don't forget to show your love for Site24x7 by clicking the Like button. To know more about this contest, head to our Facebook page .

Did You Know?
... that you could earn free monitoring credits while using Site24x7 free service? All you need to do... Login to your Site24x7 account. Navigate to 'Portal Integration' and generate an uptime button. Check the 'Allow signups through uptime button' option. Generate the code and place it in your website. Thats it! Now when any user who signs up from your uptime button becomes our paying customer, we will add free credits worth 20% of his transaction to your account. For example, if he pays $100 to us, we will add free credits worth $20. Fore more information on our Referral Program, click here .

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This week, you might have come across the news about how turkey-based hackers hijacked DNS servers of several popular websites such as The Register, The Telegraph and National Geographic Channel. They re-directed the traffic to their webpage with the slogan “4 Sept. We TurkGuvenligi declare this day as World Hackers Day - Have fun ;) h4ck y0u”. These popular website DNS servers were handled by NetNames. It’s sufficient to say they had hectic days ahead fixing the problem and allying fears about further intrusion.

We all think that our DNS servers are safe behind a firewall and that these things won’t happen to us. Only when it does happen to us, do we realize how big of a problem this, DNS hijacking, really is.

The concept is quite simple and deadly. The hackers either employs brute force DDOS attack on the servers or use SQL injection method (which was used in the latest attack) to insert a Trojan which then hijacks the original IP address in the DNS server with bogus ones. Once this is complete, visitors who land on this page are silently re-directed to hackers landing page without their knowledge. The landing page contains viruses and malwares which can instantly affect visitors system. Most of the time hackers try to re-creating a website similar to the actual website, so as to fool the users and collect user sensitive data such as usernames and passwords, while the actual website owners stay unaware for sometime before they detect it.

Hence, it is always safe to deploy steps to safe guard your DNS servers and ensure that no funny business is going on. Below are some of the key steps proscribed by various security institutions and experts on how to safe guard DNS servers which I have complied here for your reference:

DNSSEC – Domain Name System Security Extensions: When DNS was created, the focus was on scaling it for large systems and security wasn't a primary consideration then. However, with frequent hacks, providing security to DNS become primary objective. DNSSEC is a security extension to DNS system which provides adds a security layer to prevent hacks, while maintaining backward compatibility to older versions of DNS. Despite the disagreements present about DNSSEC, its role is slowly gaining support and certainly strengthens your DNS servers against such attacks.

Strong Password Policies and User Management: Usually DNS servers are managed via web interfaces. While this is much easier for the IT team to manage DNS servers, employing stronger password policies will reinforce its security even further. In addition, provide restrictive access to DNS server management to only those who need them within your IT team. And again enforce proper password policies to those users.

Demand Better SLAs from DNS Service Providers: Sign up SLAs for your DNS servers with your DNS service providers. Make sure that you know whom to call in case of any problem. You should also monitor these SLAs and ensure that you are receiving better quality and support. In addition, make sure that they have better infrastructure to cope with any kind of attack. Our Site24x7 SLA management feature allows you to monitor not just your ISPs SLAs but also enables you to monitor your DNS service provider’s SLA as well.

Configure Master-Slave DNS within your Network: If you are configuring and maintaining your own DNS servers, employ Master-Slave DNS configuration. As Michael Cobb from SearchSecurity.com puts it in his article, ensure a Master-Slave DNS network within your network. The Master DNS should be kept behind the firewall with no access to the internet. You can employ two slave DNS servers available to the internet. Even if one of your slave DNS servers is hacked, they will be updated the next time when they receive update from your Master DNS server.

Pictorial Representation of Master-Slave DNS Network. Source: SCO.com

Constantly Monitor Your DNS Servers: Last but not the least. Constant monitoring of your DNS servers should be a top priority. If you fail to not monitor your DNS server's IP address and something goes wrong, you are to be blamed. Our Site24x7 DNS monitoring service allows you to monitor your DNS server IP address every minute. You can check if your website lookup is actually retuning the correct IP address. If not, then Site24x7 automatically and instantly alerts you via SMS, Email and via Twitter about the problem. This lets you be the first responder to the trouble and take action before your user is affected.

Any organization, which uses internet to promote its business, cannot afford not to monitor its DNS servers. Hijacking of DNS servers could severely hurt the credibility of the website in question and could end up losing millions if not billions of dollars in revenue.

If you have employed any other means of security for your DNS servers, do share it in our comments section.

Have you ever wondered "Wouldn't it be great to automate certain actions when my website slows down or goes down?" We at Site24x7 have come up with an ingenious solution and we are sure you will like it.

Let’s say you have an online e-commerce store where customers can buy products online. However, during peak business hours your website might not be responding all too well or it might slow down completely due to too many connection requests. In such cases, the only option you might have is to restart some key web services to bring them back online.

While this is an important task to execute, it is a manual task and one that might take you away from other important tasks. In order to execute this action, you need to be connected to your dedicated server. This action might take a couple of minutes to restart the services. In the online world, these precious few minutes will translate into loss in revenue, traffic and consumer satisfaction.

Invoke URL Action - Automation Simplified

Now, if you have configured Site24x7 to monitor and alert you during downtime, you can simply restart your web services without having to physically intervene in the process.

Invoke URL Action Pop-up

Invoke URL Action feature (available under 'Advanced Configuration') will enable you to easily restart your web services from a dedicated server without manually interfering. Enter the script URL which allows you to restart the web services and provide the necessary authentication. You can configure them to run when your website is down or in trouble or even when it goes up.

Now, whenever your website slows down, an action from Site24x7 is triggered automatically to run the script from the dedicated server. This negates the downtime duration considerably. You can also use this feature to execute scripts which can generate logs and email them to you for further analysis. You can use these logs to identify the performance issues and help troubleshooting them quickly.

If you haven’t checked out this feature, go ahead and give it a try. Share your comments/thoughts about this feature in our comments section.

We get a lot of requests from our users on how to monitor content present in their website. This blog post will explain the benefits of monitoring the content of your website and how to use Site24x7 to monitor the same.

Why do I need to monitor keywords in my website?

For some of you that would probably be the first question popping in your mind. Right? Isn’t monitoring my website for availability alone not enough? Well, the answer is Yes and No.

Yes, because you do need to monitor your website for availability and No, because it is just not enough anymore. You need to get notified the instant your website gets hacked or modified without your authorization. This becomes even more crucial when you have an online business. Guarding your website against hacks is important as it would affect your revenue and credibility.

Monitor keywords in your website

It is quite simple to monitor for specific keywords using Site24x7. There are two methods with which you can monitor keywords in your website. You can monitor for change in content in terms of percentage and get notified only if they cross or reach certain threshold. Another way is to monitor for certain keywords which appear without your authorization.

In addition, you can also monitor for CSS, JavaScript or image file changes. You can also set alerts if any regular expression is modified in your website. Follow the steps below to configure your website monitor:

Step 1: Click on the edit link of the website you are currently monitoring as shown below.

This will take you to the edit mode of your current website monitor. In this mode, you will be able to set up alerts and configure Site24x7 to look for specific keywords.

Step 2: Click on Advanced Configuration during edit mode of your website monitor.

Click on Advanced Configuration which will open a plethora of options to choose from. Scroll down to Alert Configuration. By checking the options given in Alert Configuration, Site24x7 will notify you in the event of the website content being modified or when the website content changes by x (%) or when the website crosses certain response time (ms) threshold.

To monitor keywords, scroll down to Content Match. Here you can configure Site24x7 to alert you when it finds certain keywords present or not present in your website. You can also do a case sensitive keyword match, meaning Site24x7 can monitor for keywords with both CAPITAL letters and a combination of small and CAPITAL letters.

Once you have provided the right keywords, click on Update. Site24x7 will start monitoring your website for the presence (or absence) of keywords and alert you at the first hint of trouble. This is a sure shot way to ensure that you are the first person to know when your website is being tampered with before your customers are aware of it.

If do not have an account with Site24x7, simply signup for a free account and start monitoring your website.

The months of November and December are probably the most important times of the year for online retailers. The online sales peaks during the holiday season, and so does the website traffic. Quite often we hear reports of online stores going offline or slowing down as they are unable to handle the increase in traffic. In the short term, this leads to lost sales. In the longer run, this can lead to serious repercussions.

In order to ensure a fast and reliable online shopping experience to your customers, here are some quick tips to ensure your shopping cart does not ‘grind to a halt’ under peak traffic conditions and keep those online orders flowing:

Improve Scalability:
Ensure your web servers can handle the peak load. Provision additional servers or virtualize, if necessary.

Improve Application Performance:
Use optimization best practices such as caching, data compression, load balancing, image optimization, limiting database queries, etc.

Offer a Secure Shopping Experience:
Implement the necessary security best practices. Handle your customer's personal data with utmost care.

Ensure High Uptime of your Service:
Monitor the uptime and performance of your online shopping cart with Site24x7's web application monitor. Detect transaction errors and fix them before users are affected.

Value your Customer's Time:
Make sure customers can quickly find what they need. Use our web application monitor to find out slow transactions and take steps to speed them up.

Got any other tips? Do share your thoughts and impressions in our comments section.

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!

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.

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.

Is Your Webpage Optimized to Face the Holiday Rush?

Site24x7 October Newsletter - Track Website Performance and Win an iPod Touch this Halloween!

Steps to Protect Yourself against DNS Hijacking or DNS Hacking

Automate Actions and Troubleshoot Website Quickly Using Invoke URL Action

How-to: Monitor web page content using Site24x7

Why do I need to monitor keywords in my website?

Monitor keywords in your website

Related Posts:

5 Ways to Ensure a Memorable Shopping Experience this Holiday Season

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

How-To: Monitor website performance from Multiple Locations

Adding multi-location monitoring for new websites :

Updating billing information when your payment is declined