Site24×7 Blogs

Our Chinese monitoring location has been temporarily rendered out of service. This is due to an unprecedented disruption of network activity at the datacenter level, and this reportedly affects tens of thousands of websites. You can read more info on this downtime from our web host’s blog:

http://blog.sinohosting.net/china-servers-downtime-notice/

In order to ensure our China location users are not affected, we have routed the monitoring to our Japan server. All users who have configured China as their primary monitoring location will now have their monitoring checks coming from Japan.

We thank you for your understanding and regret the inconvenience caused. We will be shifting the monitoring to China as soon as the connection is restored.

What do you think is the fastest growing domain name on the internet? It is the Chinese (.cn) domain.  As the Chinese economy is growing, so is the number of internet users in China. In fact, the number of Internet users in China surpassed the US in 2008.

According to CNNIC, there were 298 million Chinese Internet users by end of 2008 and growing at 800,000 new users per day. It is currently 22% of Internet users worldwide, and could surpass Internet users in Europe very soon. This is to say the least an impressive growth rate.

Also, there is a new top level domain that will be offered to users. (.China) will solely consist of Chinese characters. Until now China has had to settle for .cn, which is incomprehensible to the typical Chinese Internet user.

.cn is today the largest ccTLD and the 2nd most registered top level domain after .com with almost 17 million registrations. Since CNNIC has made it very easy to register .cn domain names, .china is expected to have similar regulations. So it can be expected that the new top level domain will surpass .cn inside 2-5 years after launch, and .cn will only serve for users using Latin characters.

As announced in an earlier post, we’ve recently introduced monitoring servers in Brazil and Sweden. The Brazil server is located in Rio De Janeiro and the Swedish one is at Stockholm.

These additions further augment our global monitoring network and takes the total location count to 17. The Brazil server is our first in South America. The Sweden server is our fourth location in Europe to go with UK, Netherlands and Germany. We now offer monitoring from every continent except for Antartica!!

We will be adding more locations to our network based on user demand, so stay tuned to this space for more updates.

We recently had an update here at Site24×7. Here is a brief overview of the features/enhancements that have gone into this update.

1. Option to integrate website uptime and performance data into intranet portals/applications:

We have provided access to secure public views for all the monitors in your account. These views display the uptime and performance data of the websites you are monitoring, and these views can be easily integrated into any third-party application or corporate/intranet portals. Users can thus get a perspective of the performance of their websites from outside the datacenter, and they can get it right within any application or corporate/intranet portal.

Below is a sample Dashboard View integrated into ManageEngine Applications Manager product.

Log in to your account and visit the Portal Integration page under ‘Home’ tab to know more on this option.

2. Uptime buttons to showcase your website uptime

If your website is going great guns in terms of having a fantastic uptime as well as consistent performance, it would be a great idea to showcase that on your site.  You can now do that by embedding an uptime button on your website. This is a great way to demonstrate the reliability of your site to visitors and win over their confidence and trust.

Read more

3. New monitoring locations in Brazil and Sweden

Our global website monitoring network has now expanded to include 2 more locations, one in Brazil and another in Sweden. The Brazil server is located at Rio De Janeiro and the Sweden one is at Stockholm. We believe users having their customers in these parts of the world will find these locations useful for their monitoring.

What is your take on our latest enhancements? Pour in your feedback either through comments to this post or contact us directly.

There are some occasions when you may want to take your web site, web application or servers offline for some upgrade or maintenance purpose. To prevent your sites or applications from being monitored during the maintenance period, you should configure a maintenance schedule for your monitors and thus avoid unnecessary notifications from Site24×7.

Given below are step-by-step instructions on how to configure a maintenance schedule in Site24×7.

1. Log in to your Site24×7 account and navigate to the Alerts tab.
2. Click Schedule Maintenance->Add Schedule link. The ‘Add Schedule’ screen will be displayed.
3. Provide details such as schedule name, description, recurrence details (i.e. daily, weekly or once), start time and end time in their respective fields.
4. The ‘Available Monitors’ box will display all the monitors present in your account. Select the required monitors and move it to the ‘Selected Monitors’ box.
5. Click the ‘Add’ button to complete the configuration.

For example, we have configured a maintenance schedule scheduled to run from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM on Sundays.

Add Schedule screen (Click to enlarge, opens in new window)

The schedule thus created can be viewed from the Alerts tab under Schedule Maintenace->Schedule Details section. You may edit or delete the schedule settings from this screen or re-use the settings of the schedule for a different set of websites.

You may leverage the utility of maintenance schedules and avoid unwanted notifications during a scheduled maintenance. This helps to ensure that you receive alerts only when there is a problem and not otherwise.

Along with our recent iPhone client release, we have also included a couple of enhancements to our downtime reporting feature. Just thought of discussing these in greater detail for the benefit of our readers.

Mark Downtime as Maintenance - Exclude maintenance from Downtime Calculation

Lets just say you had taken your websites offline for some maintenance purpose. You most probably don’t want to receive alerts for this scheduled downtime and you will not want this downtime to be reflected in your reports as well. In such a scenario, you can use the “mark downtime as maintenance” option and mark this downtime as maintenance in Site24×7. This will not be considered for downtime calculation and will be displayed separately in the availability chart.

You can specify maintenance period in 2 different ways:

1. Create a Maintenance schedule for the monitor: If you know the maintenance time  beforehand or if the downtime is a recurring event, you can create a maintenance schedule for the time period. Once you create a schedule, the site will be automatically marked as ‘under Maintenance’ for the timeframe of the schedule.
2. Mark downtime as Maintenance: Lets assume you forgot to configure a maintenance schedule and Site24×7 marked your site as down. However, since you know this is scheduled maintenance and don’t really need to consider this as downtime, you can use the “Mark Downtime as Maintenance” option and mark the specific downtime as maintenance. Click the Mark as Maintenance icon from the downtime table in the monitor details page to convert a downtime to maintenance period.

Ability to add your own comments to the downtime

A second enhancement that has been included in our service is the option to specify your own comments for the downtimes. These comments can be anything that reflects the nature of the downtime or the reason for the downtime, etc.

These comments can be made public as well, so your visitors can also know the reason why your site went down.

What is your take on our latest enhancements? Feel free to comment or contact us directly for any questions.

Zdnetasia recently reported that Indian government has announced plans to introduce digital passports to its citizens from 2010 onwards.  We decided to take a closer look at what digital passports are and how they are implemented around the world.

What is a digital passport?

A digital passport, also called biometric passport or e-passport is the same as the traditional passport with the addition of a small integrated circuit or chip embedded in the back cover. The passport contains a microchip which contains the same information as on the picture page and a biometric photograph in addition to a machine readable zone. The chip is based on the “WORM” technology which stands for “Write Once, Read Many”. These passports are designed to be harder to forge and to identify the bearer more securely.

The e-passport has been implemented in around 70 countries in the world. Most European union countries had introduced e-passports around the 2004-05 time frame. In the UK, the digital passport has been issued since February 2006.

Controversies

It has not been smooth sailing for digital passports from their inception. They’ve had their share of controversies too. There have been some protests in the past about the privacy of the bearer. Activists in many countries have questioned the lack of information about what exactly the passport’s chips will contain.  When the e-passport was introduced in the United States, there was criticism against the usage of RFID in the chips. Privacy activists were claiming that the signals from the chip were not encrypted and can be easily intercepted, thus jeopardizing the privacy of the bearer. Just a few days ago, human rights campaigners in Netherlands were up in arms against the government policy of storing fingerprints taken from passports on to national database.

In spite of all the opposition, more and more governments are keen on issuing digital passports to their citizens. This is because it has the potential to bring down passport forgery thereby improving the security aspect as well as it is easier to maintain than traditional passports. So the coming years should see most European Union and Asian countries actively embracing this RFID-based technology.

We have just rolled out an iPhone client that can be used to access Site24×7 website monitoring service. The interface lets you connect to Site24×7 and view the current status of the monitors in your account.

This is useful for you to get a quick overview of the status of your web sites while you are on the move. You can view the current uptime and performance statistics for each of your web sites. You can also view SLA reports and keep track of SLA compliance. There is a separate view for outage statistics for the last 24 hours. The design comes with a tabbed interface which lets you navigate easily between these views - uptime status, SLA reports and Outages.

From the “Home” tab, you can drill down and view the global status of the website for the last 24 hours as well as view info about response time, the primary location from where the website is being monitored, next polling time, etc. From the SLA tab, you can view a summary of the various service level agreements in place. For each SLA, you can drill down and view historical data such as the SLA Goal and SLA Achieved %.

The new client will be a useful tool for webmasters or website owners to check the uptime status & SLA compliance of websites. As always, we will be improving upon this tool in the future as we go along.

Looking forward to your feedback on the new iPhone client!

Twitter has been taking over the world and many companies now use it as a platform to interact with their users. We, the Site24×7 team, have also been using Twitter to reach out to our users in near real time. You may follow our tweets to get regular updates on new features/enhancements in Site24×7 or to get your Site24×7 questions answered.

This is another method of interacting with us. Of course, you can also follow this feed for updates or reach out to us directly.

Once in a while we keep an eye on the blogosphere to understand how website monitoring services are being used by customers. While doing this, we do stumble upon certain blogs which educate their readers about website monitoring services. Here are a couple of such posts which we came across recently.

The first one was in affiliateranger.com site about the free website monitoring services available today. The article mentions Site24×7 as well as some other monitoring services. Here is what the blogger had to say about Site24×7:

Site24×7 is designed to maintain an optimal website user experience by monitoring the performance and availability of Web servers and applications from an end-user perspective. Site24×7 gives you the ability to monitor your visitors or customers-facing web properties on a global basis. Site24×7 will monitor any website from 15 locations; tracking the end-user experience from six sites in the US, three sites in Europe, and four in Asia, Australia and Africa. Site24×7 ensures the hardware and software supporting such critical functions as online purchases, site logins, web form submissions and more, are performing up to service level agreements (SLAs). Site24×7 includes an Operations Dashboard, through which all performance parameters are easily understood and any problems are automatically flagged for resolution.

Read full article here.

The second article that we came across is in the webtuga.com site. This article also provides a list of website monitoring services along with a brief explanation of each. The post also mentions Site24×7. This one is in Portuguese and it has a special mention of our SLA Management, API and alert notification features. The post is titled “Ferramentas para Monitorizar o Uptime do seu site” which when translated into English reads “Tools for monitoring the uptime of your site”

Here is an excerpt:

Apesar de nunca ter testado, o Site24×7 inspira-me alguma confiança, não só devido a fazer a verificação em multiplas localizações, mas também por permitir a gestão de SLA (service-level agreements).

Para além disso, tem ainda a favor o facto de ter uma API disponível e alertas via RSS, SMS e Mail.

Read full article here.

Both the above articles that we mentioned above contain useful information for webmasters and website owners alike. Have you come across similar blog posts? If yes, feel free to share them with us.