Site24×7 Blogs

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.

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.