Web Server Monitoring Goes to Australia

January 31, 2006, Plymouth, Minnesota -- Dotcom-Monitor has just added Sydney as its newest web server monitoring location, bringing executive class monitoring to Australia.

"Companies need to know how their web sites respond to customer usage," says Vadim Mazo, CEO of Dotcom-Monitor. "Adding the Sydney monitoring station means they will now be alerted if their web site is inaccessible or slow to Australian customers."

The Sydney's monitoring station is a robot that visits a company's web site, simulating a human visitor, and performs various functions, including surfing, form-testing, shopping cart usage, etc. Performance speed, accessibility and response times simulate a human user's experience.

Companies depend on remote web server performance monitoring to respond quickly to emergencies (such as an order form no working), as well as to plan for long term upgrades to ensure maximum satisfaction for customers. It is estimated that $20 to $40 billion is lost each year from users who abandon slow loading web sites.

Global web site monitoring secures customers world-wide

Global marketers understand that web sites respond differently in different parts of the world due to trans-Atlantic connections, bottlenecks, the quality of local connections, etc. "Just because a web site performs well in New Jersey, does not mean a customer in Sydney or London benefits from the same performance," Mr. Mazo says. "Monitoring your web servers from Sydney will tell you if you need to make changes to better serve your Australian market."

While only 13% of U.S. home users still use sub-56K Internet connections, that number is much higher in less developed countries, meaning web sites optimized for U.S. customers might not perform well overseas.

Sydney is the tenths monitoring station in Dotcom-Monitor's global network. The other five sites are:

- London, UK - Minnesota, USA - New York, USA - California, USA - Florida, USA - Calgary, Canada - Colorado, USA - Frankfurt, Germany - Honk Kong, China

Dotcom Monitor is an executive class website monitoring company, offering top performance services above and beyond the norm in the industry. Since 1998, its goal remains to protect the reputation and profitability of online business by bringing together monitoring, reporting, notification, escalation and analysis in the combination best suited to a company's needs.

About Dotcom Monitor: Dotcom Monitor is an executive class website and network monitoring company, offering top performance services above and beyond the norm in the industry, including website load stress testing introduced in 2004 (offered by very few monitoring companies). Since 1998, Dotcom Monitor has been protecting the reputation and profitability of businesses online by bringing together monitoring, reporting, notification, escalation and analysis in the combination best suited to a company's needs. Visit the website at www.dotcom-monitor.com or get more details about website monitoring services at www.dotcom-monitor.com/web-site-monitoring.asp. Get information on network monitoring at www.dotcom-monitor.com/network-monitoring.asp.

Johan Jacobsson is a marketing and SEO consultant at Dotcom-Monitor.com, a web-server monitoring company.

Web-based Supplier Collaboration Creates Value With VendorServer

VendorServer creates value with web-based supplier collaboration.

An ETO (Engineer-to-Order) company manufactures highly engineered boilers and capital energy equipment used by utility companies. The firm faced key challenges including:

?    Reduce cycle times for proposals and products

?    Uncoordinated and lengthy purchasing process

?    Improve collaboration between engineering, manufacturing and suppliers

?    Lower cost of purchased goods

?    Tighten integration with the enterprise application

The business process for collaborating internally and with suppliers prior to implementing VendorServer? needed improvement. A seamless process to work with engineering, buyers and suppliers to shrink the lengthy and cumbersome supply chain cycle was imperative. The need to communicate with design, engineering, sales and suppliers to quickly turn opportunities into proposals, and proposals into orders and executable plans, was critical. The opportunity for miscommunication throughout the entire supply chain was significant with countless departments and external suppliers involved in the process and extremely complex purchasing activities.

The lengthy and involved designing, buying and building process is further complicated by time based milestones and the proper timing of materials that can extend beyond a year. The previous business process had many manual and disconnected automated purchasing systems limiting the ability to effectively manage the supply chain process. There were no provisions for supplier interaction beyond telephone and fax methods.

Without adopting a more strategic approach, the client was faced with higher costs, less accuracy, long lead times, higher carrying costs and lower customer satisfaction. The client created a 360-degree view of requirements for taking its supply chain and supplier collaboration to a new level to enhance business operations in an area with substantial payback.

Visibility Corporation (www.visibility.com) is a leading developer and supplier of business software solutions designed for the unique needs of project-based, engineer-to-order and to-order manufacturers. Visibility's Enterprise Application solutions help midsize manufacturers of complex products operate their businesses effectively.

VISIBILITY.net is an integrated ERP solution and more. Offering unparalleled functionality and integrated workflow, this browser-based solution cost effectively delivers the power of .NET-based Web services for use with either a Microsoft SQL Server? or Oracle? database. Conducting business any place, any time, any where is a reality, deployable with unprecedented flexibility.

Visibility
Jaclyn Aldrich
978-694-8000

Professional Markeeting Firm

Is Your Website Secure On A Shared Server? Part 1

Security aspects of a shared web hosting server have always on the forefront. And, with almost 90% of websites being hosted on shared servers, the security considerations are not uncalled for.

Also know as virtual hosting, shared hosting has been the favorite of small and medium size enterprises. Owing to the fact that shared web hosting works out to be cheaper than hosting on dedicated servers. That?s because a website shares a server with other websites in a virtual environment. But, does that make it vulnerable to hacking? That?s the million dollar question. To understand the security aspects of hosting on shared servers, we will have to first understand the different modes of shared hosting.

Types of shared hosting

• Domain based shared hosting:

It works on the Virtual Private Server (VPS) technology and provides each website with a unique URL, even though they are hosted on a single server. The VPS technology achieves by creating effective partitions in the server and gets them to act as individual servers.

• Name based shared hosting:

In name based shared hosting, a websites name appears as a subset of the service providers name. Example of such service providers are geocities, blogspot etc.

• Directory based shared hosting:

With respect to directory based shared hosting, the customers website will be mentioned as a directory in the host domain name. The most important point that comes through with shared hosting is the relative lack of a dedicated IP address. That?s because most of the web security apparatus are applicable on the IP address level. That?s the reason why, dedicated severs are capable of providing a more secure environment; as they guarantee a unique IP address.

The other blockade with shared server security is the relative difficulty encountered in implementing SSL certificates.

Search Engine marketing expert, Tarun Gupta is one of the most prolific writers in the internet marketing domain with his articles being published in numerous search related websites and newsletters. He is the founder director of web development and web hosting services company BrainPulse.com.

Dedicated Servers ? Backup and Recovery Strategies for Web Hosting Companies

What kind of backup recovery strategy should a company have for its dedicated server? Web hosting companies have been debating this architecture since their existence began. It is really a question pondered by the whole IT community. There are many right solutions, dependent on your company?s ability to handle downtime. The correct solution for you will factor in the amount of redundant protection you need against the overall cost.

Before we discuss the different options for backing up and recovering your dedicated server, we should mention that the server hardware, data center, and fiber connection are all critical to reliability. This article is specifically focused on strategies to backup and recover your server?s data.

At a minimum, you can create a partition in your hard drive and backup your server weekly or monthly. There is no cost to this kind of solution, but the downsides are obvious. If your hard drive crashes, you will lose your backup as well. This kind of solution is only recommended if you can afford to lose all of your data, which most web hosting companies cannot.

Next, you can contract a remote backup service to set up offsite backups. These backups can be run daily, weekly, or monthly. The cost of this solution is around $30-$50/month depending on the web hosting provider. This option gives you a solid backup in case your hard drive crashes. The downside is that recovery time will take 6-12 hours or more depending on how much data you have. The data has to be manually copied over, and this is a slow process. If you can afford the cost, this solution is part of an overall backup system, but it is not recommended as your only solution.

The next backup option is to have a second hard drive installed on your server and have it set up to do daily, weekly, or monthly backups. Most web hosting companies that provide dedicated servers will charge between $15-$30 for a second hard drive. This is a nice compliment to the previous solution if you have the budget for both. The recovery time is faster then a remote backup. But unlike a remote backup, if your dedicated server or the datacenter are down, then you cannot access the backup. For most small web hosting companies this is not a problem. If their entire server or datacenter are down, they have larger issues to worry about. We recommend this as a complimentary option with a remote backup.

Next, a web hosting company can use mirrored RAID drives. This option will cost $50-$80/month more, but it provides the fastest possible recovery in case of a hard drive crash. You can just reboot using the mirrored drive, and you are back in business. The cost is a little higher, but this is a nice luxury. The downside of this option is that if your server is unavailable, then you still cannot reach your data. Additionally, if the hard drive becomes corrupted it will also corrupt your backup. This is why we recommend mirrored drives as part of a larger solution that includes other backup systems.

Finally, there are mirrored servers. This entails the largest cost and is really not necessary, except for those web hosting companies that can tolerate no downtime at all. In this scenario, if the server itself dies you can have another server ready to take the load. In fact, if your company is large enough, you might already need this kind of solution for performance. Some websites require multiple servers to handle the performance, and it is load balanced across them. In this case, if a server dies the system still runs. This is the best solution but it is not always necessary. And, of course it is costly.

We recommend a weekly remote backup to provide you with a fail safe version. Even if the datacenter burns down, you will have a copy of your data. To this we would add either mirrored RAID drives or a second hard drive, depending on your hosting company?s needs. If you are more worried about recovery time from hard drive crashes, which is the most frequent hardware problem with dedicated servers, then go with the RAID drives. If you are more worried about the hard drive getting corrupted, go with the second hard drive.

We hope this article provides you with the information you need to adequately back up your dedicated server!

Rodney Ringler is President of Advantage1 Web Services, Inc., which owns a network of Web Hosting Informational Websites including HostChart.com, ResellerConnection.com, FoundHost.com, ResellerForums.com, and HostingKnowledge.net. Rodney has over 15 years industry experience from programming to internet marketing. rodney@hostchart.com