Musings of a West Texas Business Venture

Site24x7 Web Review

We manage many different websites for ourselves and our customers, and we need to make sure that they are consistently up and running. Over the years, we have used many different solutions, including commercial off-the-shelf software and custom developed software.

Everyone who owns, runs, or maintains a website needs to make sure that it is up and running.

Recently, the developers and business leaders behind the Zoho suite of software began Beta testing their new product, site24x7. We have been testing their product for about 4 days.

After signing up at Site24x7, you define any number of sites by clicking on "Monitor a Website", or you can monitor a transaction (I have not used this capability, because transactions would need to be read-only on most of our websites). On each website, you enter a URL, a frequency to monitor, and then can choose some "Advanced Options".

Advanced Options include notification when certain words are, or are not, present. It also includes when the content changes more than some percentage (I did not test this, and I'm not sure Site24x7 considers the initial content) and when the response time is too slow. You can also define one more contacts to email in the case that any of the events occur. Site24x7 can also handle POST or GET requests, and can handle Basic authentication (I would love to see it support FORM based authentication).

Contacts can be either email or SMS based, though they set the limit at 10 SMS messages per month per web site. I'm not exactly sure what happens when you should get the 11th message (if they just do not send it, that could be a major problem for some web masters).

Each site that is monitored has a "report" page allowing you to see a graph of response times, up-time and down-time percentages including historical and daily averages.

A few other sites have had good things to say about Site24x7, including a review here and Download Squad.

Of course, it's Beta software, and we've found a few flaws with it. I took down a site for about 30 minutes, and was never notified. Oops.

posted by Anthony Presley @ 7:53 PM