Site24×7 Blogs

We launched Site24×7 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 Site24×7 Premium account?

You get all the features of the Site24×7 Standard account (earlier known as Site24×7 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.

We’d introduced website monitoring from multiple locations in Site24×7 quite a while ago. Now with our most recent update, we have enhanced our multi-location monitoring capabilities and expanded our monitoring network to make it more global in nature.

We have added monitoring servers in 4 new locations across the globe - two in the US, and one each in Asia and Europe. These along with our existing monitoring locations in California and UK take our location count to 6.

Our global monitoring network

Listed below are our current active monitoring locations and their ip addresses. To ensure uninterrupted monitoring from all these locations, please make sure your firewalls allow these ip addresses.

California (72.5.250.84)
Houston (75.125.250.20)
New Jersey (66.246.218.186)
UK (91.186.0.4)
Netherlands (84.244.138.41, 84.244.138.42, 84.244.138.43, 84.244.138.44)
Singapore (203.211.133.45)

Earlier, the bulk of the monitoring used to be done from our primary location (California) and only rechecks were done from secondary locations. Now, you can specify the locations from which your website needs to be monitored (available in Premium Account). For example, if most of the visitors to your site are from US & Europe, you may configure monitoring from US and Europe. This way you can be sure that your websites are up and available to people who matter the most to your business.

Note: We currently monitor only the uptime of websites from different locations. Other monitor types such as Web Application monitor, Web Page Analyzer, Email Server, DNS server monitor, etc. are monitored from a single location only (California). Over the course of time, multi-location monitoring support will be extended to other monitor categories also.

What is your take on our newly enhanced monitoring network? Pour in your feedback!

We rolled out some important features in Site24×7 a couple of days ago. Here are a few highlights of this update:

More Monitoring Locations

We have added four new monitoring locations to go with the existing two locations. That makes it six monitoring locations in total - California, Houston, New Jersey, Netherlands, UK and Singapore.

By monitoring website uptime from these different geographical locations, you can be doubly sure that your sites are accessible from all parts of the world. We also have plans to add more locations to our monitoring network in the near future.

New user packages

We have introduced 2 new user packages - Standard and Premium accounts. The Standard account retains the same features of our Professional account and is suited for small businesses. The Premium account has all the features of Standard account plus the ability to monitor website uptime from multiple secondary monitoring locations which are geographically separate. This makes the Premium account an ideal fit for small & medium businesses wanting to make sure their web sites are up and accessible from different parts of the world.

Read more about our user packages.

Other enhancements in this update include an enhanced reports section, a ‘Test SMS’ option which enables you to send test sms messages to your mobile from Site24×7, enhancements to the web application monitor section, an improved ‘Upgrade’ screen, etc.

Do try out the new features/enhancements in Site24×7 and as always, we will be glad to hear your feedback!

We are enhancing our monitoring network by adding more monitoring locations. For this purpose,Site24×7 will be down for an update on Mar 25, 2008 between 05:30 hrs GMT to 10:30 hrs GMT . You will not be able to access Site24×7 during this time.

Sorry for the short notice and apologies for the inconvenience caused.

Update: Due to unforeseen issues, we are extending the maintenance period by another 4 hours. We will be back online by 14:30 hrs GMT

Update: We are back online now. Thanks for all your support.

In this update, we have added some useful new features into Site24×7 and revamped our website as well. Do visit http://site24×7.com for more info. We will give more details about this update in another blog 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.

In an earlier post, we’d discussed the importance of website content monitoring and how Site24×7 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 Site24×7 for website content monitoring!

Website defacement is any unauthorized access of a website by a hacker or a system cracker. A hacker might break into the web server and create a page of his own. When visitors come to the website, they might get to see a totally different page or it might perform unexpected actions. Typically hackers leave some messages or shoutouts to their friends. Most of the defacements are harmless, but sometimes they can used to cover up something more sinister such as uploading malware or spyware.

Webmasters and website owners usually take necessary precautions to ensure their websites do not fall into unauthorized hands. In spite of all these efforts, some malicious hackers do manage to gain unauthorized access to the site. The recent hacking of a UK website is an example.

For a webmaster, what’s worser than web page defacement is not even knowing about it. Imagine coming to know of it from your users. This is another reason why you should continuously monitor your web pages. It is not enough if you monitor the website’s downtime or performance alone. You should keep an eye on website content as well to know if someone has defaced your website.

With Site24×7, you can check for the presence or absence of any keywords or phrases on your web page. If any keyword or phrase is available or not available, Site24×7 will alert you. You can also configure Site24×7 to alert you when your website content changes or when your web page is modified. Using our web page defacement monitoring features, you will instantly know when someone has gained access to your website and changed its contents so that you can initiate corrective actions quickly.

What do you think of the web page content monitoring features of Site24×7 ? Reply through comments or contact our support team directly.

In some of our earlier blog posts, we’d answered some common questions pertaining to various sections of Site24×7 such as the Reports tab, Alerts etc. Today we will discuss questions related to the usage of Site24×7 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 site24×7 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 Site24×7 account, navigate to ‘Account->Change Password’ tab, enter your old and new passwords and click ‘Update’.

We had earlier written about the increasing usage of Site24×7 among European (read non-English) users. Some of these users write articles or blog posts describing the features of Site24×7. We are featuring 3 such articles today - one each in Spanish, Portuguese and French.

The Spanish article is by Rafael Pinero in Visual Beta website. It is titled “Site24×7, monitoriza tus páginas web” and mentions the most basic feature of Site24×7 - availability and response time monitoring of websites by sending http and https requests to websites. It also talks about Web Page Analyzer, DNS monitors, Mail server monitoring, SMS alerts, etc.

Here is an excerpt:

Below is a rough translation of the above passage (thanks to Babelfish)Or we have spoken in other occasions of programs to manage the hardware of your PC like the CPU with CPU-Z or Power station Brain Identifier, your graphical card with GPU-Z or all your hardware in general with iStat Pro, but if you are to webmaster and what it interests to you it is to know if your servant behaves and he stays online, the application that you need is Site24×7.

Site24×7 is an application online that is in charge to monitorizar the services Web that you indicate to him to be sure that they do not fall and that they are available to be used. For it, the servants of Site24×7 which does are to send requests HTTP or HTTPS to the service Web that you indicate in regular intervals and enviarte an alert in case that he does not respond.

Read full article here

Thanks for the post, Rafael!

The Portuguese article appears in boorlix.com website. It is titled “Site 24 x 7 - Monotorizando o seu site” which means “Site24×7 - Monitoring your web pages” in English.

O Site24×7 é um serviço que lhe permite obter informações sobre o seu site tais como verificar a disponibilidade do servidor, a velocidade, detectar mudanças e receber avisos por RSS, SMS ou e-mail de quando o seu site está em baixo.

A versão gratuita permite-lhe verificar até 2 sites com um intervalo de 60 minutos e com alertas por SMS, já a versão paga permite-lhe por apenas 0.50$ mensais por domínio verificar com um intervalo de 5 minutos, avisos de mudança de DNS, verificação do funcionamento do SMTP, notificações por SMS, mudanças das meta-tags, etc…

The article mentions the value offered by Site24×7 along the basic differences between the free and paid versions.

Read full article here.

The French article is written by Eric in presse-citron.net and is titled “Monitorez en temps réel le fonctionnement de votre site web avec Site24×7″. This roughly translates to “Monitor in real time the operation of your web site with Site24×7″

The article talks about url availability & performance monitoring features of Site24×7 along with references to the 15-day trial account as well as paid accounts.

Read full article here.

Thanks for the post, Eric!

We recently came across 2 articles on Site24×7 in the blogosphere. The first one is by Raj of Technobuzz and the post is titled is ‘Monitor your Site Status with Site24×7‘.

It gives a brief introduction to Site24×7 and its features and also explains how site24×7 works. Here is an excerpt:

Read full article here

Of course apart from the features mentioned in Technobuzz, Site24×7 also offers the Web Page Analyzer, email server monitor, and DNS monitor.

The second article this week is by Aibek of Makeuseof.com and the post is titled “Site24×7: Website Performance Tracker”

This one is basically a short review of Site24×7. Here are a few excerpts:

“Site24×7 continuously monitors your site’s status and alerts you in case it goes down. Downtime alerts can be sent to your email, feedreader (via RSS), or mobile phone. Apart from that, it also provides you with weekly reports of server performance. With free account you are allowed to monitor upto two websites and setup tracker to check them once every 60 minutes. While this may be sufficient for low trafficked websites, larger sites should probably go with something better.”

Aibek also gives a feature list for the free account and also mentions the free and premium accounts available in Site24×7.

Read full article here.

Thanks for your reviews, Raj and Aibek! Glad that you liked Site24×7.