Website Monitoring Blog

Jeremy Mayes, the author of the PPC Discussions blog, told about his two-month experiment: Jeremy tracked every AdWords ad he clicked and created a detailed statistics for every click. He managed to click more than 1000 ads during these two months. Along with many interesting data he found out one astonishing fact: about 11% of all clicks lead to dead pages! The reasons for dead pages may be different – server errors, removed or renamed landing pages, site down, typos in destination URLs or even malice – but the result is empressive – 11% of advertisents simply don’t work, meaning 11% of all the advertising funds are just wasted!

What can be done to avoid losses? Jeremy recommends monitoring the landing pages with website monitoring services. If a landing page goes down or gets accidentally removed, you will be the first who finds out.

Popularity: 61%

While surfing Wikipedia I’ve found a nice attempt to embrace the major players at website monitoring market and compare them. A table contains details of 33 most famous companies providing web site monitoring services, both commercial and free. The table has been created on November, 13, and by now it has descriptions for about 40% of the companies listed there. The information provided in the table includes minimum check intervals, supported protocols, approximate monthly cost, interface language, notification options, etc.

Popularity: 42%

Spammers have evolved to perpetrate some pretty complicated schemes to get their wares (and warez) to large audiences. Recently they’ve shown sophistication beyond simple mailings by breaking CAPTCHA codes, enlisting decoy social networking sites and blogs, and even some search engine optimization.

It’s a tangled web, the intricate knitting started with exploiting CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart-in case you never knew) vulnerabilities to set up email accounts, which are required to set up blogs and/or profiles on social networks with enough traffic and clout to pop up in the search results.

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Popularity: 59%

Today I’ve collected a list of most important website monitoring companies, that provide both commercial and free services.

• Dotcom-Monitor – Affordable Web site monitoring and testing for individual sites, applications, and networks. We offer load testing, network monitoring and free website monitoring trials.
• WebSitePulse – Remote web server and website monitoring with instant alerts via SMS, e-mail, and phone when your website becomes unavailable. Real-time monitoring reports and diagnostic tools help you minimize website downtime. Global worldwide monitoring locations. Free monitoring service available.
• WatchMouse – Web site monitoring service for web server performance measurement. Free and paid remote web site and server monitoring
• Webmetrics – Website Performance Monitoring, Web Application Performance Monitoring, Load Testing
• Uptrends – a leading provider of hosted website and server monitoring services. Reduce costly downtime. Free 4 week trial!
• Service Uptime – Free website monitoring service checks your site from worldwide locations and alerts you instantly via email or SMS when it becomes unavailable. Detailed uptime statistics and performance reports available.
• HostTracker – Website Uptime Monitoring Service
• Siteuptime provides website monitoring services. Receive instant email notices when your website becomes unavailable and view detailed uptime statistics and performance reports for your website monitors.

Popularity: 35%

Several useful network tools — this list will be updated every week.

• Gtrace is a traceroute visualization tool that uses a combination of methods
  to either determine or guess at the physical location of a node in
  the traceroute path. It is flexible enough to support addition of new
  databases, heuristics to map IP addresses to physical location and maps.
• mturoute is a small Windows tool to determine the path MTU between you and a specified host.In traceroute mode it will additionally show you the mtu at every hop between you and the specified host.
• NeoTrace provides graphical traceroute information.
• Prtraceroute is a version of traceroute, from the RIPE
• Internet Routing Registry toolset, that presents routing policy information together
  with the real time packet trace obtained from traceroute. It adds AS information to the
  normal traceroute output, making use of Routing Registry (RR) database information.
• Scamper is a program that conducts traceroute to large numbers of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in parallel to fill a specified packets-per-second rate.
• TCPtraceroute uses TCP to a port at the end node to do a traceroute.
• Traceroute-nanog has additional features like AS lookup, TOS support,
  microsecond timestamps, path MTU discovery, parallel probing and others.
• VisualRoute a GUI based traceroute for Windows.

Popularity: 33%

You spend days and nights on your new brainchild. Your friends have forgotten how you look like because you are so busy with your new website. Then some time passes, and your brilliant ideas have finally been materialized — soon you will be earning hundreds, thousands, or even millions.

The more time and money you invest in your start-up, the more important the question of reputation and trustworthiness is. There is a basic rule: your e-business must be accessible every second to every Internet user from all over the world. Downtime for any reason is completely unacceptable. And that’s why you should consider runnings website performance tests and signing up for a web site monitoring account.

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Popularity: 47%