Site24×7 Blogs

Author: Arun

Mashable, the popular social networking news site, recently had a post titled “13 Free and Cheap Website Monitoring Services“. The post mentioned some of the popular website monitoring services today, a list which also included Site24×7.

This is what the folks at Mashable had to say about Site24×7:

Site24×7 - It is free to monitor two URLs that are polled every 60 minutes. This is another service that allows you to create maintenance windows for your server. The premium plans also offer reasonable prices for various levels of monitoring.

Thank you for writing about us, Mashable!

Author: Arun

If you’ve subscribed for Site24×7’s website monitoring service using your credit card, you might occasionally find your payments being declined by Site24×7. Generally, payments are declined if our billing system is unable to verify the billing information you’ve submitted.

Below are some common reasons why your credit card payment may be declined:

1.  Invalid Amount: Sending too large of an amount, zero dollar ($0.00) amount or amount less than one dollar (American Express/Discover).

2.  The transaction amount exceeds the available credit limit set by the card issuing bank.

3.  The transaction was declined by the customer’s card issuing bank.

4.  Account was just “Activated”, taken Live.

5. The format of the expiration date is being passed incorrectly.

6.  Expired or non-matching expiration date.

7.  Transactions are being posted to TEST servers using ‘real’ credit card numbers.

8.  The web site/shopping cart is pointing to the test servers instead of to the live servers.

9.  Payflow Link: The transaction process mode is still set to ‘Test’.

10.  Payflow Link: Trying to process a Level 2 or Level 3 (Company/Business) card.

11.  The Zip code contains all zeros.

12.  Trying to perform a voice authorization using the wrong transaction type.

13.  Card Security Code (CSC / CVV2) does not match.

The most common reason for declining of payment is that your credit card information might change after you’ve submitted it to Site24×7. Therefore, our billing system is unable to verify the billing info. The solution involves updating your billing information in Site24×7 and we will process the payment from your next billing cycle onwards.

Author: Arun

We have added a new feature into Site24×7 due to popular demand. You can now get Site24×7 to monitor your web sites every minute or every 60 seconds.

This feature is available for all accounts - Standard, Premium and Evaluation.

How can one-minute monitoring help you?

If you monitor your websites every minute, there is a real good chance that you get to know when the downtime starts and when it ends.  You get instant notifications whenever any downtime is detected and also when the site comes back up.  If your website is checked every 60 seconds, you are much more likely to catch any downtime than any other monitoring resolution.  With 1-minute monitoring, you get more accurate uptime stats as well as a better perspective of your site’s downtime.

We believe this feature will come in handy for our users. Do give it a try and let us know your feedback.

Author: Arun

Most commercial website monitoring services available in the market sell monitoring packages to their customers - like they charge an ‘X’ amount for up to ‘Y’ number of monitors. For example, you can monitor up to 10 monitors if you buy the silver package, up to 50 monitors if you buy the gold package, and so on. While this pricing model has its own benefits and is widely adopted, there is a downside to this from the customers’ point of view. Most of the times, you end up paying more that what you use. So even if you need to monitor only two websites for example, you end up buying the silver package and pay for eight extra monitors.

We, at Site24×7, follow a different pricing model. It is the Pay only for what you use model.  Your charge will depend upon the number of monitors & type in your account and their monitoring intervals. Nothing more. Nothing less.

This pricing model is designed to be cost effective and results in substantial savings from a customer’s point of view. When you upgrade your Site24×7 account to a paid one, we charge your credit card based on the information specified in the upgrade form. The amount charged from your card is added as monitoring credits to the account balance. These credits are then deducted from your account balance as per your usage. When the account balance runs low, we automatically renew the subscription. Your card will be automatically charged again depending on your usage at that point of time. So if you started off with 5 monitors and then cut down to 3 monitors for example, your next charge will be for 3 monitors. You may add extra monitors to your account at any point of time and the charge will be re-calculated accordingly.

Because of our account balance mechanism, you cannot go over budget. If you suspend your monitors for a while after purchase, the credits will stay in your account. You may come back later, may be after 6 months, and restart monitoring from where you left off.

Our payment options include credit cards, Purchase Orders and Paypal accounts. Of course, we do offer a 30-day money back guarantee, in the most unlikely case of you not liking our service.

If you’d like to know our exact pricing, you may refer the pricing page of our website or contact our support team directly.

Most customers opt to purchase Site24×7 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.

Last week, Comcast.net users had nearly 1.5 hours blackout of their email services. It was inaccessible from 11 PM to 30 minutes past midnight. As per CIO, hackers changed the DNS Server records to point to alternate servers and hence Comcast.net users were unable to check their mails.

If an organization’s DNS servers are down or not functioning properly, it will lead to problems for the end users. This just goes to show how important it is to have your DNS Records monitored too, just to make sure your users as well as your brand identity are not affected.

Firefox users might be interested in this. Here is a simple trick that lets you view your Site24×7 downtime and trouble notifications within Firefox itself, in the Firefox sidebar.

Prerequisite: You have to subscribe to Site24×7 RSS feed in Google Reader

Below are the steps to view your alerts in Firefox sidebar:

1. Subscribe for a RSS alert from Site24×7. Login to your Site24×7 account, navigate to ‘Alerts’ tab and select the RSS link.
2. Login to your Google Reader account and subscribe to the Site24×7 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 Site24×7 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 Site24×7 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 Site24×7’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 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!