Monitor the Uptime of Your Websites and Servers

Websites are nowadays used to do business and earn profit. If you belong to those who own such a website or just planning to start on-line business, you will have to monitor the uptime of your websites or servers. Do not let your clients to let you know about your downtime.

There are companies, which websites are essential for their business success, as they are generating the most or the whole of the company's revenue. Maybe also you belong to them. When this kind of website (server) is down, your business is affected. If your website is hosted by another company, you probably have some sort of "uptime" guarantee. Nevertheless, what exactly is uptime and how do you measure it. The basic definition of uptime is the period of time when your site is up and running, being accessible and able to satisfy customers.

The opposite, when your site is not accessible, it is down. And that is how you measure downtime. Faulty routers, malfunctioning LANs, or a loss of electrical power typically causes most of the downtimes; only rarely are caused by a natural disaster. Most often, it is caused by failures from the telecommunications company or an application failure, not a fire, flood or other catastrophe.

The cost of downtime calculation of course depends on many factors, like the products and services you provide, the size of your company, the number of online sales, etc. Even if you do not sell any products or services online, there is still a cost of downtime, but then in terms of damage of reputation etc. Calculate the cost of downtime is difficult and varies from one company to another. There is no "average business", so the statistics that quantify the cost of downtime for average businesses are not helpful.

The cost of downtime include direct costs such as the labor charges for a team of technologists who had to resolve the outages. The indirect costs are much more difficult to calculate and include potential lost revenue, reductions in worker productivity, damaged reputation with customers and in the marketplace, lost future sales and the cost of storing unsold goods. Financial analysts and accountants at your company can help you come up with the factors for your particular business.

If your website is generating profit for your business, you will for sure monitor it by an external monitoring service. The on-line market offers you to choose from different services to get uptime reports, statistics and get notifications as soon as your website is down. You can not let your customers to inform you about your own downtime.

To understand the importance of being aware of downtime, and to be alerted as soon as possible when a problem occurs, have a look at these numbers:
- According to a report by Cumulus Research Partners website downtime, caused by problems such as network failures, costs European businesses more than ? 5 billion a year.
- In the automotive industry downtime is often worth some $1.000 a minute.
- According to a recent study conducted by ARC Advisory Group, accounting for nearly five percent of total North American production, more than $20 billion is lost each year due to unscheduled downtime. Clearly, the traditional "fail and fix" approach to maintenance is no longer a viable MRO strategy.

Many hosting providers guarantee 99 % uptime. 99 % uptime sounds good, but means that your site could be down more than 3.5 days a year, and in today's Internet that is unacceptable. Comparing to that, 99.9 % uptime is much better, but with 8 hours and 45 minutes of possible downtime do not have to be always enough. The table below shows the percentage of uptime and the related downtime per year.

99 % ........ 87 hours, 36 minutes (more than 3.5 days)
99.9 % ...... 8 hours, 45 minutes, 36 seconds
99.99 % ..... 52 minutes, 33.6 seconds
99.999 % .... 5 minutes, 15.36 seconds
99.9999 % ... 31.68 seconds

As you can see, a 99 % uptime may not sound too bad, but it can cost you quite a lot of loss in revenues.

There are more than 30 uptime monitoring websites worldwide, while some of those have also affiliate partners. Among those are: Alertra, AlertSite, Dotcom monitor, InternetSeer, Jaguard, RedAlert, SiteUptime, WatchMouse, WebsitePulse and others. Almost all of them offer some prepaid packages based on monthly fees, varying by number of possible monitored sites (servers), additional services and by the complexity of the service. The price of their basic prepaid package is $5 - $40 per month. For this price you can monitor only 1, or maximum of 3 devices, choose from quite a lot of protocols, allow to send notifications to multiple contacts via e-mail, IM, pager or SMS, allow to choose between daily, weekly, or monthly reports by email and of course uptime performance and statistics available on-line. The Professional packages can go up to $180 per month or even higher.

There are just two completely free 24/7 monitoring services: Montastic and mon.itor.us.

Montastic's (http://www.montastic.com) biggest advantage is simplicity of the service, while it offers just basic service including real time monitoring and alerting by e-mail one contact person - the registred user, or by RSS feed, when the website is down and when it is back again. It allows to monitor only http websites, limited to the number of 100 (what is not a limit at all), checking it every 10 minutes from two different locations.

Meanwhile mon.itor.us (http://mon.itor.us) provides network, website and server monitoring service supporting 11 protocols with possibility to monitor unlimited number of devices and alert unlimited number of contact persons by e-mail, RSS feed, IM message, pager or SMS. There are also other remarkable features as personalized interactive interface, where you can add server performance and availability tests, set daily, weekly or monthly reports sent by e-mail. Tests are performed from 3 geographically distributed servers, and they are always adding more interesting features as they are still in beta version.

Peter Cernak works at Sourcio (http://www.sourcio.com). The company develops mon.itor.us and offers a wide range of IT services and Open Source solutions for small and medium-size businesses

Update Your Entire Website Instantly Using Server Side Includes

Imagine my plight... I have 100+ pages on my website and I have to change my e-mail address and the copyright info on all the pages. The reason...

My mail box is over-flown with junk mails.

My only option is to edit all my web pages offline and then upload each one of them again, not to mention countless errors I make in the process.

100+ pages is still a small website. Imagine what it will be like if my website had 1000+ pages?

Sounds scary right?

If you would like to avoid the kind of mess I'm in right now, you have one option. Start using "Server Side Includes (SSI)"

In technical jargon, Server Side Includes are directives which you can place into your HTML documents to execute other programs or output such data as environment variables and file statistics.

If your only intention is to manage your website more effectively and painlessly, it is more than enough if you learn one "Directive" of SSI - the "Include" directive.

In simple terms, SSI Include is a line of code which you can use in your HTML documents to include contents from other documents. In other words, change just one file (the Include file), and your ENTIRE SITE is instantly updated!

The basic syntax of an Include directive is:

Where PATH_TO is the "VIRTUAL" path to include file on your server.

Here's how to include your copyright info and navigation links using SSI Includes...

First, you need to check with your server administrator whether your server supports SSI or not. Most servers support them.

Second, you need to rename all your HTML files with extension .shtml

-----SIDE BAR-----
You can start with one file and if everything goes fine, rename rest of the files. -----SIDE BAR-----

To keep things organized, you can create a directory at the root level called "includes" to house all of your included files. Now create a HTML document with only your copyright and navigation links. Copy everything that is between the BODY tags of this document and paste it in a new file.

Save this file as nav.html or any name you like with extension .htm or .html. You need not save this file with .shtml extension. Now upload this file to your "include" directory which you created for housing SSI Includes.

To include copyright info and navigation links in a HTML document in your SITE ROOT, place the following code where you want the copyright info to be seen:

Now if you want to include copyright info and navigation links in a HTML document in a folder UNDER your site root, the code will change to:

...and so on.

If you want to change or edit your copyright info or navigation links, just edit and upload your nav.html file and the change will be reflected in all the documents (using the "Include code") instantly!

You can also create your website headers/footers using SSI Includes.

There are host of other cool things you can do with SSI. For more info on SSI, you can visit the following sites:

http://www.useforesite.com/tut_ssi.shtml http://wdvl.com/Authoring/SSI/Intro/index.html http://www.bignosebird.com/ssi.shtml

Vishal Rao publishes an informative e-zine: iNet Profits. Subscribe to his e-zine and get his free e-mail course: "11 Killer Strategies To Explode Your Online Profits", by sending a blank e-mail to => sub@inetprofits.par32.com

Dedicated Server: A Smart Choice for Web Site Hosting by www.vipwh.com

Hosting your personal or business web sites on your own dedicated server may seems expensive choice in comparison to shared web hosting, but at the end, it proves a smart choice. Shared web hosting, no matter how well managed, cannot be 100% reliable and stable. However if you have your own dedicated server you can manage to avoid most of the variables affecting the reliability and stability of a server, commonly experienced by shared hosting accounts; variables such as: overload, bad codes and scripts from other users (especially beginners); and, too many applications and components uploaded, and so on.

On a dedicated server you will install only software and applications you want to use, while on a shared hosting server you will find a host of other software and applications installed for other users.

By the very nature of the account, a dedicated server: reduces your dependency on the web host; and bypasses time delays and possible expenses incurred from these. With dedicated server hosting you can provide instant support to your own clients whenever required, which is not possible if you are on a shared server. A reliable and fast support service is vital for your own business growth just like the stability and reliability you wish for your own website. In business, reliability is reflected through word-of-mouth as one of the most effective promotional activities.

For people with clients, such as Graphic Designers and Web Designers a dedicated server is invaluable. A dedicated server will bring extra income into the studio, not just as a hosting facility, but, as a designer knows only too well, for the extra bread and butter income value. If you have 24hour access to your own dedicated server then you can adjust, correct or update a clients website in minutes, allowing you to keep the dollar back in your studio and not in someone elses. Ready availability results in reduced labour costs for the client, but higher studio-income frequency for the designer. Hence you will see the return of all your regular offline clients, bringing their web work with them.

The need for a dedicated server to your average shared server user is realized when stats tell you: how quickly people left your site because it was taking too much time to download; or how many daily visitors you are down by, because your site was not up. The true negative is the worry of how many lost visitors could have been your future paying-customers. The loss could easily equal the value of the upgrade to a Dedicated Server!

For a business, a website that is quickly downloadable and up all the time gives the visitor encouragement that your service is just as reliable, hence you will be more likely to make a sale. It will also enhance the companys image and encourage existing customers to refer your service to others. This will result in more sales for less promotion.

If you are serious about your online presence you need to get a Dedicated Server.
Paras Shah
Chief Technology Officer
VIP PowerNet, Inc.
Ph: (713)787-6501
Email: paras@vippowernet.com
http://www.vipwh.com
http://www.vippowernet.com
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