Webmaster Tools | The Official Blog of Site24x7

Tweet this | Website Monitoring Features | Success Stories

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.

Access Archives

If you have not subscribed to our monthly newsletters yet, click here to subscribe.

We are glad to announce the release of the following new features.

The ability to monitor FTP/SFTP server availability and performance
The ability to monitor the response of round-trip time of FTP/SFTP servers
Comprehensive DNS Analysis tool which provides you with in-depth information of your DNS
Three New Monitoring Locations

New Feature: FTP/SFTP Server Monitoring

The FTP/SFTP Server Monitoring allows you to monitor FTP server's availability and performance. It also tracks the performance of FTP round-trip time (RTT).

FTP Server Monitoring: Monitors FTP Server host availability and performance
FTP RTT Monitoring: Monitors the upload and download response time of FTP service

FTP service is one of the most widely used network protocols by various businesses. It is the simplest way to share information with customers. Hence it is essential for businesses to ensure the availability of mission-critical data to customers at all times. Any undetected downtime can cause loss of revenue in hundreds of thousands of dollars.

FTP/SFTP Monitoring

Site24x7 lets you monitor your FTP server’s host availability and performance from across 30+ global monitoring locations. It instantly alerts you whenever the FTP port becomes unavailable, enabling you to take corrective measures to restore FTP access.

Site24x7 also enables you to monitor the upload and download response time of your FTP server. It uploads/downloads a test file into your server and monitors its response time (time taken by the test file to upload/download). It also works for secure FTP servers (SFTP).

Site24x7 automatically alerts you when,

a) FTP server is unavailable
b) Username/password for the secure FTP server is incorrect
c) Response time crosses specific threshold values
d) File upload and download time crosses your specified threshold.

DNS Analysis Tool:

We have improved our DNS Lookup tool which brings you in-depth details of your DNS in a single snapshot. It gathers the IP address, TTL (Time to Live) and response times of

SOA records
MX records
Reverse and Forward Lookup
Name Server Performance

along with its current status. You can use this tool to run ad hoc tests of your DNS.

DNS Analysis Tool

New Monitoring Locations:

We have now introduced three new monitoring servers – one each in India, Turkey and Israel. The IP address of these three servers is given below for your reference. If you plan on using them, make sure that they are white listed.

Istanbul, Turkey:

46.235.8.142
46.235.8.143

Tel Aviv, Israel:

91.228.126.149

Mumbai, India:

180.149.241.212

You might have also noticed that we have come up with a new design for our website. We have simplified our tab layout with bare essentials and made it easier to access our key website monitoring features. So go ahead and sign up for a free trial and try out our new features. If you have any comments regarding our new features, feel free to share it in our comment section.

We are glad to announce that we have updated our Site24x7 service. This update includes following new features and enhancements such as:

Analyze Web Page is now rechristened as Web Page Analyzer. The Web Page Analyzer now supports monitoring from multiple geographical locations. We will slowly roll this out across all our monitoring locations.
Screenshots to confirm downtime or problem in website.
Run traceroute analysis from the actual location from which the error was reported, hence facilitating more meaningful error analysis.
Get in-depth details such as DNS, Connection time, First and Last Byte and Throughput of your website.
Site24x7 Reports have been revamped. The Summary Report, Response Time Report, Downtime Report, Outage Report and Busy Hour Report have been improved by introducing line graphs and area charts.
Multi-user login option has been included for Professional account users
The tools section of the website now sports more social features by providing easy to use, share on Twitter and Facebook buttons. The results from these tools are saved on our servers so the reports are accessible at any time.
Webmasters and even consumers can check the validity of a website's Security Certificate (SSL).
Two new monitoring locations added – Phoenix (USA) and Montréal (Canada).

So let me now get into the details of these features.

Analyze Web Pages from Multiple Locations Using a Real Browser

We have improved our Web Page Analyzer (previously known as Analyze Web Page) such that it not just downloads the entire components of your website, but also renders them using a real browser. This response time is then displayed along with individual component details, file sizes, status and loading time of individual components. This gives you a clear picture of how well your website renders enabling you to identify and troubleshoot components which cause response time to increase. Another best thing is that you can now analyze your web pages from multiple locations.

Analyze your web pages

Screenshots to confirm downtime or problem in website

With the website monitoring component, we have gone one step ahead by improving reporting when there is a downtime or trouble. We will now show you a screenshot from a real web browser to confirm the downtime or error.

Granular Data for your Website Monitor

Now for every website you monitor, you can find key component data such as DNS Time, Connection Time, First Byte Time, Last Byte Time and Average Value under response time.

DNS Time – Time taken by our monitoring server to resolve DNS server
Connection Time – Time taken by our monitoring server to connect to your server
First Byte Time – Time taken by our monitoring server to receive the first Byte from your server
Last Byte Time – Time taken by our monitoring server to receive the last Byte from your server

Run Traceroute Analysis from your selected primary Location itself

Whenever a downtime is detected from a monitoring location, Site24x7 will perform a traceroute analysis of your website from that particular monitoring location. This would enable you to quickly identify if there is any performance issue within your ISP network and take corrective steps.

Tools section just got social by introducing Twitter and Facebook buttons

Gain credibility for your website by sharing website’s uptime and availability via social media such as Twitter and Facebook. We also provide you with a permalink with which you can share the results of your test. You can also email it to your customers.

Share your website uptime and availability

Ensure Safe Environment for Your Customers

One of the common phishing attacks happen with expired or fake SSL Certificates. As it has become easier for hackers easily obtain fake SSL Certificates, it becomes your responsibility to ensure that you check the whether the website you are about to conduct business is safe and secure. Our tool will help you to check for the validity of the website SSL certificate and inform you if there is any problem with the certificate.

Interested to try out these features? Sign up for a 15-day free trial now.

Google has always been interested in speeding up the web. True to their motives, they have launched Google Chrome, one of the fastest web browser, they revamped their search engine algorithm and launched a new version called Caffeine. They also recently launched Google Instant which instantaneously displays results as you type.

The latest news that is floating around the web is Google is planning to launch a new version of image format – WebP. The new image format, which is an open source format, reduces the size of a JPEG image by nearly 40% without affecting much of the quality. Google is assuring readers and experts alike that by adopting its new standard, searching images would yield faster results and thus creating smaller footprint of the image.

According to Google, nearly 65% of all the data are images. Hence it considers this adoption a very important one and that all manufacturers of devices should consider. As the use of Smartphones are increasing steadily, accessing images from the web through these devices becomes even more critical.

A quick comparison between the current format JPEG and WebP. Source: Google

Google has already successfully implemented its own video format WebM for all its YouTube videos in addition to H.264. What does this all mean to web designers and website developers? Well for one thing, they need to make sure that their websites are compatible to these formats in the coming years.

Secondly, this means that this could vastly improve the responsiveness and accessibility of their website across various platforms to users. Thus, the quicker the images load, the quicker the website loads, the quicker the user gets to access its contents. It translates to faster load times, lower downtimes and increase in revenue.

This is even more critical for advertising agencies who deal with online ad displays. The chances are that if they adopt these new formats, they could load ads faster, deliver more number of impressions and hence improve the revenue even a lot faster.

Being a website monitoring service, we place a huge emphasis on your website performance and uptime. We believe that websites should optimize and make it faster for the user to access content. In case of WebP, if enough companies and manufacturers display their support for WebP, it could very well become the image standard for the Web.

While these discussions go on about new standards and formats being introduced, or how to improve web and make it faster, one un-deniable fact remains: you would always require tools to ensure that you stick to those standards to ensure high performance. Which is why, we at Site24x7, make sure that those website performance tools are available to you at all time.

In the meantime, tell us what you think of this new image format from Google and its impact on the future of the Web in our comment 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.

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.

Webmasters and website owners will know how important it is to ensure their web applications are performing as expected for end users. Site24x7’s web application monitor makes it easier for them to keep track of the availability and performance of web applications such as customer logins or shopping cart purchases. The monitor sends out notifications if it detects any problem with the transaction, such as an unwanted downtime or a slow response time.

An important use of web application monitor, which sometimes gets overlooked, is its ability to assist in fine-tuning the performance of applications. Since the monitor provides you with historical data of key performance metrics, you gather a substantial amount of useful information about your web application over the course of time. This information can be used to proactively improve your web application and make it an absolute joy for customers to interact with.

Scott Savage has explained this beautifully in his blog. In fact, he mentions Site24x7’s web application monitor as one of his top 3 tools for fine-tuning web applications.

Some excerpts:

Performance Monitoring – It is a great idea to do user testing and time how long it takes to follow a path through your application, for example logging into your web-based CRM application, searching with some set terms, returning a result and then displaying the details of this result. You can time it in a user session, providing you with valuable (but once off) time information about user scanning and data entry time. How does this time differ at 9am Monday versus 3am Thursday? A web application performance monitoring tool like site24×7 allows you to run this path automatically every 5 minutes, 24×7. This not only allows you to check your servers are serving your application at a consistent time, but even just serving it at all. It will email you immediately when your application stops responding, send you a weekly performance summary report, show you performance from multiple locations around the world and even help you independently track your SLA compliance (and even publish all this via an API or public page).

Don’t wait for your customers to call you and complain, these tools make feedback easy, even to the point where users are providing it instantly without even realising. The next step is using these tools to proactively improve your web application, which of course is easier said than done. Just remember you have to measure before you can manage.

Read full article

We came across a couple of articles on the internet which feature Site24x7. The first one is by Prem Godara in his Techno Mirror blog. He has an article about finding out what increases the loading time of a website. The article is titled "Does your website load slowly! Here's a solution" Prem mentions two tools - Site24x7 and Octagate Site Timer. Here are a few excerpts from the post:

Are you one of those users whose website takes lot of time to load but don't know what is the problem and which component of the website is taking too much time to load. Generally, several components of a web page (like Iframes, Flash, Javascript, Images, CSS,) can increase the page loading time but it is very hard to pinpoint the exact culprit that decreases the speed of the site. A normal HTML web page may have advertising scripts, YouTube videos, images and so on. I came across two online services which can help you by pinpointing as which component of your website is taking too much of time to load. One such service is Site24x7. Site24x7 is a hosted website monitoring service that helps webmasters ensure their websites are up and running at peak performance. The Site24x7 servers sends out HTTP or HTTPS request to your website at regular intervals of time and alerts you if it is down. This service is available both as free and premium version. In premium version, you get some advanced features such as monitoring DNS/email servers, online web applications and so on.

Thanks for writing about Site24x7, Prem! As Prem mentioned in his blog, there are 2 ways through which a user can find which component is increasing the site loading time. One is the Analyze Web page tool and the second is the Web Page Analyzer monitor. The second article which we want to bring to your attention today is one in the Free Pedia website titled 'Monitor your Site Up and Down Status'. This article provides brief information about Site24x7's website monitoring service. Few excerpts:

Site24×7 is a simple hosted web site monitoring service that works around the clock making sure that websites are performing flawlessly. You can set a threshold for a web page such that - if the page load time of that page is more than 3 seconds, you should be notified through EMail, SMS and RSS.

Thanks for writing about us, guys!

In an earlier post, we'd discussed the importance of website content monitoring and how Site24x7 can help with monitoring web page defacement. Continuing on the theme of website content, today we will take a look at some online tools that might be useful for website content writers/developers. These free tools might be useful when you are working on the content of a new website or if you want to improve the readability of your existing website content. First up, there is the readability index calculator tool. This tools calculates the readability index score for a passage in your website. Based on this score, you can get an idea of how visitors to your site might perceive the content on your site. Enter a passage of text in the field and select the language for which the readability is to be calculated. The tool will give you a reading ease score and a grade level. If you select English language, the score is calculated using the Flesch-Kincaid method. Mystery Matador is a similar tool, but it provides suggestions to improve your content along with the readability score which makes it slightly better than Readability index calculator. Writing quality content on your web pages is a sure way of attracting good traffic to your web site and these tools might be of help. Once you've finalized the content and posted them online, there is always Site24x7 for website content monitoring!

Author: Arun Have you tried tracking your keyword position across multiple search engines such as google, yahoo or msn? If you are one among those who go to these search engines one by one and search, you must have really found it a tiresome and repetitive process. Now here are 2 different services that can help you out. Jux2 is a search engine which claims to give you combined search results from google, yahoo and msn. When you search for any keyword, jux2 compares its position across these search engines and ranks sites accordingly. I searched for "website monitoring service" and Site24x7.com was in the 3th position (courtesy of #7 rank on Google, #4 on Yahoo and #4 on MSN) Combo Result Viewer from Rankquest works in a similar fashion, but has got more options and is flexible. You can either compare multiple keywords on a single search engine or compare a single keyword across multiple search engines. They also support a large number of search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Hotbot, etc. We searched for website monitoring service keyword and found out that Site24x7 ranks #4 in Altavista and #7 in Netscape search. Handy tools to help you search better, aren't they? Saves you lot of time!!

Is Your Webpage Optimized to Face the Holiday Rush?

New in Site24x7: FTP Server Monitoring, DNS Analysis Tool and Three Additional Monitoring Locations

New Feature: FTP/SFTP Server Monitoring

DNS Analysis Tool:

New Monitoring Locations:

New in Site24x7: Analyze Your Web Pages with a Real Browser

Google WebP and Website Performance: What does this mean for the future of web?

Analyze and Improve Website Performance using Web Page Analyzer Tool

Attention Span of the User

Google Effect

How-To: Monitor website performance from Multiple Locations

Adding multi-location monitoring for new websites :

Improve Web Application Performance using Site24x7

Find out what increases your web site load time

Improving the readability of your website content

Comparing search results across search engines