Website Monitoring Services: Reviews and Facts

finalwebsites.com — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 21:42:52 +0000

There are so many possibilities why a website went off-line, all of them have one in common: Your visitors can’t access your site and maybe they will never come back!

Possible problems why a website might be off-line:

Web server or network is down – A very common problem, there is so much computer technology used…
Some web service has stopped working – It might be just one of them; MySQL, Apache or Named/Bind and your website doesn’t function for 100%
Too much traffic on your site – Most web servers doesn’t have the capacity for a high traffic website. 500 visitors at the same time might be enough to make your site slow or that a web server crashes.
External serving problems; a name server or DNS server is down – this one is nasty; if your DNS zone is down, it’s possible that you see the problem a day later, while others see that your site is down since a while.
A script stopped working properly – If a script is written and tested everything looks fine, but what if you get some external content via RSS or by user input? Sometimes a simple, but not standard, text character can break your website.
At last but not least “the hacker” – there are so many people on the web trying to bring a website down.

Even if you try to do anything to protect your website or application against all the trouble above, you’re not safe for a failure. You have to monitor your website and hopefully a problem is notified fast enough before you loose a lot of visitors.

Some of you will say:

“I don’t need to pay for a service, because my hosting provider is doing this for free!”

That’s right many good providers will monitor the server you’re hosting on and/or they provide tools which will monitor your server or website. If you use them, check if these tests are done by a server outside from the network where your website or server is hosted. If there is a problem in the rack or router where the monitoring server and your website is located, you will never get a message about the down-time.

Some other important feature for international websites, is the ability to do test from different locations around the world. A problem might exist for only people from some continent, if your business has to take care about this, you should know about problems happen far away from your websites location.

Website monitoring is not a protection against failures but the following features will help you to “tackle” problems very fast:

Monitor from different locations – if one fails the bot has to use the next one
Multiple notification options – SMS/text messages and email are required, if you can send a downtime message to more than one person, do this!
Tests for specific content – Just a ping or HTTP header is often not enough, test for specific text on your site
Adjustable values for a timeout – Some websites need more time than others to get loaded.

(Screenshot response times Site24x7)

If your website and server is working fine, the number of downtime messages should be very low. If you need to spend several dollars a month for SMS/text messages, it might be usefull to spend this money for better hosting. Website monitoring is to get warned if something went wrong.

Website Monitoring Service Provider

In this article we review three website monitoring service provider, all of them offer a great service product and you find them in a lower price segment. That will say, these services are acceptable for most of the websites on the Internet.

I used Site24x7 since they started offering services a few years ago. They offer anything you need to monitor your server or website; Tests on websites or server ports (you can monitor every server port) are only a view options. Visit their website for all the features they offer. They offer a free account and 15day trials for their paid services, if you use the standard or premium service you pay for each single test period and location. If you need multiple test locations, you should use the premium plan because this plan includes 6 free locations for each test. If you need more than one website tested from multiple locations, than is this provider more expansive than others.

Hyperspin is monitoring provider who offers a lot of features and also a great reseller program. If you’re looking for a way to monetize your websites traffic, by offering your own monitoring service, you should try them. All test features are available and they have multiple locations and you can setup four of them as a global setting for all your tests. They don’t charge you for using all the locations. They offer discounts if you buy more or if you pay in upfront for a whole year. I stopped using them because their control panel was several times not accessible from my laptop (using different IP addresses).

Pingdom is the current servuice I’m using to monitor all my websites. Their control panel and website looks very modern and they offering a great plan with five tests for only $9.95/month. They offer e-mail, SMS/text message notifications and a some great integration with Twitter. Multiple test locations are included without any additional charge. I like the fast and clear interface and off course the price. I’m sure I will keep using them the next years.

While most of the features for these three website monitoring service providers are the same, is the pricing very different. I’m sure all three working great, just try them.Similar Posts:

.tel domain launch, the next mobile story

Olaf — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 20:45:21 +0000

Since a few days domain names with the .tel TLD are available for registration. After a sunrise and landrush period it’s possible to register your personal .tel ID for less than $20.

Why buying a .tel domain?

A .tel domain is not like other domain names. These domain names are hosted by “special” .tel hosting providers and a .tel website looks totally different. Since this domain is released for mobile devices, it’s not possible to create your own custom website. What you get is a kind of personal profile page where it’s possible to add personal (contact) information, links and custom text.

Next to this information it’s possible to show “private” information which is accessible only by “friends”, yes there is also a soialc idea behind the .tel domain. People can send messages too each other and become Friends. All communications are done though the .tel control panel or the interface from telfriends.tel website (you need to join that site too). The idea is that people are able to access your personal site on a mobile phone with the ability to choose the way how to contact you (Phone call, e-mail, SMS, MMS, Skype, etc.)

How does it work?

If you register a .tel domain the name server point to the .tel hosting platform from your registration provider or his partner. I guess a domain transfer is not that easy because all data on your .tel website is stored inside the DNS. To enter your data you have access the control panel provided by the .tel hosting provider.

It looks like that a lot of domain names are already registered and there is also a lot of endorsement about the .tel domain. While peope using more and more mobile devices to access the Internet, has this way of communication maybe a market. Telfriends is working now but need really more functions for socialmedia sites like MySpace, facebook Linkedin etc. I’m sure if more people will register a .tel domain the whole idea has a future.

Register your personal .tel domain

Several ICAN credited registrars offer the .tel domain for registration (Dynadot, Name…). Check also the cheap offer by dotster.com below (please send us a comment if the offer is expired)

Dotster: Limited time only $11.95
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