Website Monitoring NewsLatest posts and articles on website monitoring services.

You have to look hard for a company that makes cooler software than Panic. At least if you’re a Mac user, titles like Coda, Prompt, and Transmit should ring a bell.

Panic’s latest app is Status Board. It turns your iPad into a highly customizable dashboard. There are many widgets that come with the app, including a clock, a calendar, email, <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter, RSS, and more.

We’ve seen similar things before, but there’s a twist: you can also make your own widgets for Status Board. Using the Do-It-Yourself widget, we created a very simple example of how you can display the status of your Pingdom checks in your very own widget on your iPad.

Introducing the Pingdom widget

<img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-21635" alt="widget pingdom status board" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/a57ad_widget1.png” width=”200″ height=”453″ />There are already some widgets integrating Pingdom’s monitoring service with Status Board including this one by Justin Mecham. Since we think Status Board is such a cool app with a lot of potential we wanted to create something fairly simple, which as many of our 300,000+ customers as possible could download, install, and use.

With this widget on your iPad, you will see a list of all your Pingdom checks and their current status. It updates itself every minute and each check is shown as being up, down, or paused. If you need to, you can triple-tap the widget to make it reload anytime you want to.

The widget does require you to upload a few files to a web hosting account. But don’t worry; it will work on pretty much any type of account, including shared hosting ones.

To get this widget up and running, you need to upload a few files to your web hosting account. You also have to edit a PHP file to make sure the widget knows which Pingdom account to access, but no coding or programming is required.

Installation on your server

<img class="alignright size-full wp-image-21632" alt="files pingdom status board" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/a57ad_files1.png” width=”169″ height=”160″ />1. First, download this ZIP file and unzip it.

You now see the folder pingdom-statusboard. To the right here you will see a list of the files that should be inside this folder.

2. Upload the entire folder to your web hosting account. A shared hosting account should work just fine as long as there is support for PHP.

3. You need to edit the update.php file and put in your Pingdom login and Pingdom API application key. Open the update.php file with your favorite text editor and make the changes. Make sure you save the changes to the file once you are done.

4. First, your log in details:
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "youremailaddress:yourpingdompassword");

5. Then, you need your Pingdom API application key. In my.pingdom.com, go to Account > The Pingdom API and follow the instructions. Then copy the key (that rather long piece of characters and numbers) and paste it into the “update.php” file:

curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array("App-Key: Your-Pingdom-API-Application-key"));

6. Make sure you save the file. If you edited the file on your computer make sure you upload it to your server.

7. Now that the widget is configured on the server you can go ahead and add it to your iPad.

Set it up in Status Board

1. In Status Board on your iPad, switch mode (cogwheel symbol top left of the screen) so you see the white checkmark in the top left of the display.

2. Tap the Do-It-Yourself icon (bottom of the screen, far right), and drag it out to the place on the dashboard where you would want the widget to be displayed.  You can move and resize it later if you want to.

<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-21579" alt="drag" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/39862_drag.png” width=”580″ height=”435″ />

3. Tap the widget to open the Do-It-Yourself panel as shown below.

4. Type in or paste the URL to the folder you uploaded to your server. E.g. http://www.example.com/pingdom-statusboard/.

<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-21578" alt="add-url" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/82456_add-url.png” width=”580″ height=”435″ />

5. Then tap the checkmark at the top left of the iPad display to switch to normal mode in Status Board.

Your widget will now load and show a list of your checks and their status.

If you want to resize the widget, just touch and drag the bottom right corner of the widget to the size you want. To move it around, similarly just touch it and drag it to where you want it.

What’s next?

Panic has blogged about a number of ideas for how you could use Status Board. In addition, we’d like to throw in a few ideas ourselves:

• Change how often the widget is updated.
• Change the size and look (edit the CSS.) Perhaps you want it bigger, wider, or with different colors.
• Make it so that you can tap the status of a check in the widget to pause and un-pause it.
• Integrate data from other services.
• Add a chart to the widget to show the performance of a check. Perhaps the user should be able to tap a check to display the chart for that particular check.
• Since the widget is really just a web page you could show it anywhere with a web browser.

We hope you will install the widget

This is of course just one example of what kind of things you can do with a Pingdom account in terms of integrating it with apps and services. There’s our <a href="http://royal.pingdom.com/2013/04/25/wordpress-plugin-pingdom-real-user-monitoring/”>wordpress plugin and <a href="http://royal.pingdom.com/2013/05/14/pingdom-real-user-monitoring-bookmarklet/”>bookmarklet for Real User monitoring just to name a few.

We hope you will give our widget a try and make your own customized version of it. If you come up with something really cool, let us know, we’d love to know more about it.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

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<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/dbd23_231696_inside_a_rackmount_server.jpg” rel=”fancybox”><img class="alignleft wp-image-2135" title="server monitoring” src=”http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/dbd23_231696_inside_a_rackmount_server.jpg” alt=”" width=”192″ height=”144″ />A server is a system of computers that provides network services. It is a collection of hardware and software facilities working together for the purpose of realizing effective communication among computers. <a href="http://www.websitepulse.com/services/server.and.network.monitoring.php” target=”_blank”>Web server monitoring is carried out using web server software and it involves the software checking the working conditions of the server and sending messages to the checks on parameters such as the extent to which the CPU is used, performance level of the network in use and the disk space. It can have additional features such as alerting and benchmarking. The process of monitoring is divided into several categories as described below:

Firewall monitoring

This is the process of having a close check on your firewall. Monitors such as PRTG may be employed to perform this task. It is equipped with a variety of sensors that undertake the process of firewall monitoring easily. One gets to know the exact activities going on in their internet in terms of data flow in and out of their system. The security of your system is highly boosted since any malware trying to get its way into your system is automatically detected and a warning message is sent to you. This monitoring system ensures that you are in control of your internet usage and indicates the top connections, top talkers and top protocols.

Bandwidth monitoring

The bandwidth of a server system is monitored using a bandwidth monitoring software. It involves complete identification of the actual problems affecting a network system. This helps the administrators to start working on the problems from the go instead of continuously guessing what could have gone wrong. It keeps track of the information about the usage levels as far as leased lines are concerned. It is responsible for supervision of network connections, tracing the usage trends and measuring the bandwidth being used for billing purposes. This monitoring system is also involved in making decision concerning router traffic balancing and alerts the administrator in case of flaws in network load.

Router monitoring

The fact that routers and WAN links form the most expensive components of a server system calls for effective monitoring to avoid incurring great losses. The act of monitoring routers help the administrators of the given server subscribe for enough bandwidth and avoid over-subscription that could lead to paying for more than necessary. This avoids possible congestion and other related network problems. Router monitoring helps in optimizing bandwidth allocations ensuring large network availability. It entails sporting a problem and initiating upgrades or even replacements if necessary. The administrator is made conversant with traffic trends hence the ability to plan for capacity and increment ROI as well as visualization and resolving WAN link flaws.

Switch monitoring

Protective switch monitoring system should always be put in place to avoid adverse effects of failures on LAN users. The system undertakes monitoring for port utilization and traffic with necessary alerts. The monitors here detect any potential storms on broadcast and prevent them. It notifies the administrator on the heavily used and underused ports. Data loss is taken care of by alerting the administrator whenever a port begins to discard. Switch port mappers are used to quickly     supervise the status of the devices interfaced with the switch ports.

NetFlow monitoring and packet sniffing

NetFlow monitoring informs the administrators where their bandwidth is used, the person using it and the reason as to why the person is using it. This is important in that it shows you how the usage may affect you network. If it is potentially harmful then you can take the necessary corrective precautions depending on the nature of the danger. Its configuration involves setting a NetFlow sensor in PRTG and creating a new NetFlow sensor for each IP. Packet sniffing is used in a network to capture and record data flow. It allows for discerning every single packet and carrying out analysis on its predefined parameters. It is an addition to regular bandwidth capabilities. Their sensors make use of the host machine cards.

Network and VoIP monitoring

PRTG plays a very important role which is keeping the administrator informed before a failure or malfunction occurs in their network. This is useful as the administrator can take measure that prevents the flaws from happening hence reducing the cost of repair. Network monitoring increases the efficiency of a network through keeping track of bandwidth and data consumption. Network monitors are easy to install and use. They support remote control through notification techniques and multiple location monitoring. VoIP monitors constitute powerful QoS sensors that can measure jitter, the latency of a network and packet loss. With PRTG an administrator can be informed of his data usage on the instant and warned in case of quality deterioration.

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<img class="alignleft wp-image-2129" title="Mother's Day" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/3dbff_hip_mom-180×300.png” alt=”" width=”144″ height=”240″ />Mother’s Day recently passed and retailers, restaurants and spa centers sighed with satisfaction as Americans spent more this year than they did last year. According to IBISWorld, the total spending for moms reached $17.06 billion compared to the $17.02 billion in 2012.

Apparently, sales were up to husbands, partners and kids and as it usually happens, many of them waited almost until the last day to purchase gifts online.

“It’s our second-busiest time of year behind Valentine’s Day,” Wendi Day, the owner of the Old Town Florist in Portland, Ore., told the Portland Business Journal,” wrote MSN Money.

Last year, we monitored some of the most popular websites used to buy gifts for moms. They all demonstrated excellent performance and availability, so we were curious to see whether they could keep up with the high load of traffic this year just as well. Considering that sales were higher this time, and that Mother’s Day is one of the busiest days for retailers throughout the year, we expected some of the most popular websites for gifts to either crash or slow down during the online gift purchasing fever.

We were, however, pleasantly surprised to find out that the online shopping for that special day went almost flawlessly for the eight websites we monitored. Uptime was 100% in most of the time – only Sees.com and Teleflora.com experienced very slight interruptions.

The response time for some websites, however, remained an issue just like last year – Teleflora.com had the same slow response time as in 2012 – 16.296 seconds. The website with the best response time, however, was personalizationmall.com, and we would assume that their revenue losses were brought down to minimum compared to their competitors.

To see detailed statistics day-by-day for each of the monitored websites, go to our performance tracking reports. Should you have a business online, we recommend that you take a close look on those reports and understand the importance of having your website up and running 24/7.

In the meantime, we have already started monitoring some of the most popular websites for vacation planning and booking, and we will soon publish the reports on how they dealt with the heavy traffic during the vacation season.

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<img class="alignleft wp-image-2129" title="Mother's Day" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/ca29f_hip_mom-180×300.png” alt=”" width=”144″ height=”240″ />Mother’s Day recently passed and retailers, restaurants and spa centers sighed with satisfaction as Americans spent more this year than they did last year. According to IBISWorld, the total spending for moms reached $17.06 billion compared to the $17.02 billion in 2012.

Apparently, sales were up to husbands, partners and kids and as it usually happens, many of them waited almost until the last day to purchase gifts online.

“It’s our second-busiest time of year behind Valentine’s Day,” Wendi Day, the owner of the Old Town Florist in Portland, Ore., told the Portland Business Journal,” wrote MSN Money.

Last year, we monitored some of the most popular websites used to buy gifts for moms. They all demonstrated excellent performance and availability, so we were curious to see whether they could keep up with the high load of traffic this year just as well. Considering that sales were higher this time, and that Mother’s Day is one of the busiest days for retailers throughout the year, we expected some of the most popular websites for gifts to either crash or slow down during the online gift purchasing fever.

We were, however, pleasantly surprised to find out that the online shopping for that special day went almost flawlessly for the eight websites we monitored. Uptime was 100% in most of the time – only Sees.com and Teleflora.com experienced very slight interruptions.

The response time for some websites, however, remained an issue just like last year – Teleflora.com had the same slow response time as in 2012 – 16.296 seconds. The website with the best response time, however, was personalizationmall.com, and we would assume that their revenue losses were brought down to minimum compared to their competitors.

To see detailed statistics day-by-day for each of the monitored websites, go to our performance tracking reports. Should you have a business online, we recommend that you take a close look at those reports and understand the importance of having your website up and running 24/7.

In the meantime, we have already started monitoring websites for vacation planning and booking, and we will soon publish the reports on how they dealt with the heavy traffic during the vacation season.

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If you are a web developer, you should definitely check out jsDelivr and JSter.

JSter is a catalog of over 1,100 JavaScript libraries and tools for web development, where users can rate contributions, and share their experience with others. jsDelivr is a free CDN (Content Delivery Network) where any web developer can host their files, including CSS, fonts, JavaScript, jQuery plugins, etc. Currently almost 600 projects are hosted on jsDelivr.

To find out more about these two projects, we interviewed <a href="https://<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter.com/jimaek”>Dmitriy Akulov (representing jsDelivr) and <a href="https://<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter.com/bebraw”>Juho Vepsäläinen (representing JSter).

Q: Let’s start with jsDelivr, Dmitriy. According to the site, jsDelivr is “a free super-fast CDN for developers and webmasters.” Explain a bit more what that means.

A: jsDelivr is a public open-source CDN where anyone can submit a project to be hosted and delivered by our network. Most people probably know that google hosts jQuery and a few other popular libraries. We don’t look at the popularity of the project to approve it for inclusion in jsDelivr. Plus a lot more types of projects are allowed, like CSS frameworks, fonts, wordpress plugins etc. By using GitHub, we allow the community to fully interact with jsDelivr by adding and updating files.

What makes it super-fast is the unique multi-CDN infrastructure we use. MaxCDN (NetDNA) and CDN.net (which is powered by the huge federated network of OnApp) agreed to combine their powers for the good of the open source community and to sponsor us and become our CDN providers.

All traffic to our CDN providers is load balanced based on availability and performance for each individual user by another official sponsor of ours, the company Cedexis. This unique system not only gives us the best possible uptime and performance but also allows us to expand dynamically and add new providers on the fly.

Q: There are many CDNs available to developers, webmasters, and others today. Why should they use jsDelivr?

A: Currently we host 570 projects, which makes us the biggest public CDN out there.

Plus jsDelivr is free, fast and open source. We have no strict rules, and we don’t take weeks to respond to requests and update projects. Everything happens within a couple of days, and any GitHub pulls are merged even faster.

Since the project is non-profit everything is done with the users in mind. We do not rely on a single CDN provider, which makes jsDelivr independent, and no single company can influence us with their decisions. As we mentioned, our setup is very flexible, and we have good relationships with plenty of CDN providers. So even if it would happen that we experience issues with one provider we can switch without any problems.

Q: Then let’s move on to JSter, Juho. What is it about? What motivated its development?

A: You could say the whole thing got started in January 2011. A friend of mine asked for a list of JavaScript game engines. As I could not find one I created one, and for one reason or another I shared it at the JavaScript section of Reddit. Encouraged by the feedback I decided to start cataloguing JavaScript libraries and tools. This led to the birth of jswiki.

In all its simplicity, it has proven to be a valuable community resource. Early 2012 I was approached by the developer of Socket.io, Guillermo Rauch. He proposed that it would be a nice idea to take the content and wrap it into an alternative user interface. Some further development and ghw was born. It is a tool that allows me to achieve just this, and you can see the results at jswiki.org.

Even though this was a step forward, there was still some functionality missing. Some of it simply cannot be implemented without having some kind of a backend. The developer of Symfohub, Michael Bodnarchuk, contacted me some time after this. Given that he had some technology already and I had content and some vision on where to take it we decided to collaborate.

As a result, JSter.net was born. The jswiki data provided us a starting point, and it has grown immensely since. Besides having just a catalog, we have also produced original content for our blog. And we are continuously improving the service. Our primary goal is to make it easier for people to find new libraries and make their own libraries more visible. It is so very easy to miss some awesome library you just might need.

Q: If someone would want to help out with either project, how could they do that?

A: For JSter we are continuously looking for ways to improve our site and want to make it more useful for you, the developers. You can highlight immediate issues via that little “Problems?” button in the corner of the site. Alternatively you can poke us directly through email for more complex queries.

Of course, given that we are basically a library catalog we may be missing some great projects so we definitely don’t mind if you help us find those. So go ahead and add anything you might feel we’re missing.

In terms of jsDelivr, the best help for us is the support of the community. Add a new project, update an old one, submit some feature requests, etc. This helps a lot. And of course use our CDN and integrate it in your services. The increasing number of hits, to see how people use it, that’s what keeps us going.

Q: Finally, can you tell us something about the future for either site?

A: For JSter, we have some interesting things in store. This includes programmatic access to the data, code metrics, and, of course, more blog posts. Basically we want to improve our offering and make it more appealing to the community.

When it comes to jsDelivr, we plan an even bigger and faster network by combining region-specific providers. In addition, we always try to develop new features that will help and benefit our users.

If anyone reading this has some ideas, just send them to us, we’re always willing to listen to ideas.

Have you created a cool web dev project?

We’d like to say a bit thank you to Dmitriy and Juho. Neither project may be that big yet but the passion that drives these guys to keep developing and improving the projects is impressive. We can only think that there are big things in store for JSter and jsDelivr in the future.

Have you created something cool, some project for the community, which you’d like to share with us? We’d love to hear all about it so please let us know in the comments below or reach out to us on <a href="http://<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter.com/pingdom”><a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

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<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/010f8_893839_video_games_fan1.jpg” rel=”fancybox”><img class="alignleft wp-image-2125" title="fix your website from home" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/010f8_893839_video_games_fan1.jpg” alt=”" width=”210″ height=”176″ />When it comes to building your business, it is very important to have a fully functioning website or else you are going to miss out on potential clients, resulting in a loss of revenue. Thus, you need to always make sure your website is up and running properly as several different issues can cause your website from loading and working properly. These are easy corrections though, all of which you can do on your own, at home, to make sure your website is available to the world.

When you attempt to visit your website and see an error page instead of your website, you are experiencing one of two problems: your website or host isn’t working or there is a problem between your computer and the host server. In order to determine the problem, there is a series of easy tests you can perform to find and correct the issue.

1. Try to reach another website. If any other website does load normally, it means your Internet connection is working properly. If not, you know the problem is with the Internet connection and you need to contact your Internet service provider. Once you figure out the Internet connection is working properly, but you continue to have a problem reaching your website, do as follows:

2. Try to visit your site’s hosting company’s website. Both your website and the host company website use the same server, and if the company website is not working, you will know it is a server problem. If you are able to visit the website, then the issue is with your own website or the domain name.

3. Try to visit your website from a different computer, tablet or phone. This is to make sure there isn’t something wrong with your ISP. If you can visit the website, then you need to contact your ISP. If not, the problem is still either with your site or the domain.

4. Try to ping your domain. To ping your website, click “Start,” “Programs,” “Accessories” and “Command Prompt.” Then type in the word ‘ping’, then a space and finally your domain name. You should receive a series of reply messages, including the bytes used, IP address information and other data. If you receive any of these – the website is working. However, if the website is not working you’ll receive a ‘timed out’ error message. Should this occur:

5. You need to perform a traceroute command. This identifies different ways your computer connects to the domain and should point out the problem. Return to the Command Prompt, type in the word ‘tracert’ then a space and your domain name. A series of 19 different lines appears, displaying information regarding the website. 1 is the Internet gateway; 2 is the ISP of the original computer the website connects to; 3 is the extra network; 4 is ‘Request Timed Out’; 5-9 are routers on a global gateway, depending on the country the website is based out of; 15-17 is the Net Access Corporation network in the area; 18 is the router on the network of the website, and 19 is the computer the website is hosted on. In the four lines of data there are three stars and the ‘Request Timed Out” listed. If this information is displayed in any other line, then you know where the problem is.  You can then find out if you need to contact one of the Net Access Corporation points or other network sites that have the request timed out.

If the ping and traceroute pointed to a fully functioning website, you have a few other options available. You need to open your Web design software and look up the connection information. This is called a few different things, depending on the software you are using, but it is where you type in your domain name, host information and other client identification data to properly connect and upload your updated website to the Internet. Look over this information and make sure it is correct. You might find the wrong domain is typed in or your host ID number does not match what the domain and host provider gave you. To double check this, log onto your domain provider’s and server’s website and log into your account. If anything is off make sure to correct it and update everything.

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<a href="http://www.websitepulse.com/services/transaction.monitoring.php” target=”_blank”>Application monitoring watches out the availability and performance of multi-step web transactions and web applications to ensure they deliver excellent performance from the end-user perspective. Typical web transactions could be customer logins, purchase order fulfillment, submitting different types of web forms and other user interactions with a website and web application.

monitoring your website for any flaws, errors or suspicious hacking alerts should be performed frequently. Waiting until you are at the end of a section or insert is wasting your time and your website’s functions.  Therefore you should keep a proactive stance regarding monitoring.  You should be the first one to realize a problem is looming, and you should be able to fix it before it is common knowledge.

Real-Time monitoring

Real-time monitoring measures your traffic from your requesting data and then its return to you.  This represents Real Time monitoring. You will use two kinds: active monitoring – incorporating an agent to monitor applications using proves or robots that are present to report a system availability and transactions, and passive monitoring - usually without any agent and using network ports.  Most user companies will have more to support web- based applications.  Therefore active monitoring used with passive complement each other especially during off hours when your transactions are fewer.

Security monitoring

The ability to ferret out attacks and intrusions is covered by security monitoring. Since each network bring in their own protocols into this seek and destroy security mission, monitoring your security can be complex.  You will have to set certain points for monitoring your security and those points must be appropriate.  Therefore it is better for the business to retain a competent security company to audit any installations and guarantee an adequate set for threat barricading.

Understand Application Performance

When you analyze data, it assists you in understanding how your applications are  working as the raw data will easily show your balance between volume and total revenue.  It is inevitable, of course, that applications will have errors.  Being proactive in  your monitoring gives you the privilege of finding errors or problems first.  If these things are going to happen in your company, it is much better for you to discover them before your customer.

When Proactive monitoring Isn’t Enough

You have been diligently proactive in all things and it still isn’t enough?  That least you with the only solution:  Be Reactive.  You sometimes overlook the importance of frequent back ups.  This will cost you wasted hours of downtime if you can’t correct that trait immediately.  Redundant back ups are the way to  go.  Match CodeGuard and wordpress Backup = DropBox for perfect protection. If one fails, you still have the other.

Tests for monitoring

The monitoring of your applications requires numerous tests with different criteria.  There are tests for Host, domain, Website, Foreign Location, and others, including Blacklist, which is a test to determine the existence or absence of any malware among your connections.  One of the more interesting tests is the Great Wall of China, which determines if your website is received and available at a set place in China.  This is also done for places in Europe and Australia. China has taken steps to prevent websites it does not admire, and has a firewall in place, although it can be breached. See China Firewall By Pass

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Here is the latest collection of must-read articles for the weekend. We regularly publish these lists with what we hope is useful and interesting content for you. The topics vary but we try to include website monitoring, web performance, devops, and more.

This week we have selected articles on autmating web performance optimization, fallback for when CDNs fail, programming language popularity, and more.

This week’s suggested reading

• <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR5urTx8S4E”>Automating Performance Best Practices with PageSpeed: Video of Ilya Grigorik’s presentation at google I/O.
• Automating Web Performance Optimization: A presentation by Tobias Baldauf, in which he says that web performance optimization itself can become very time consuming. The presentation covers how to automate monitoring and optimization to keep your sites fast and resilient.
• CDNs fail, but your scripts don’t have to – fallback from CDN to local jQuery: If you put content on CDNs, you increase your external dependabilities. Scott Hanselman shows how you can use jQuery to create a fallback, just in case the CDN you use fails.
• User Experience Trends for Admin Dashboards: Jake Rocheleau takes a look into various styles and ideas for creating administration dashboard pages.
• Programming Language Popularity: Drew Conway has created an interactive chart of how popular different programming languages are based on data from Github and StackOverflow.

You can also subscribe to these articles

You can also subscribe to these weekly articles and receive them in your email inbox as soon as a new one has been published. Sign up here!

Image via Shutterstock.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

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You might be the system admin who doubles up as a crazy soccer fan rooting for your favorite team. On May 25th if you are planning to be at Wembley for the glorious all German finale of the Champions League, leave your work behind to us. Site 24X7 will monitor all your servers, websites, and other vital statistics and give you a status update when you are busy rooting for your favorite team.

The Site 24X7 smart phone app (available both for iPhone and Android devices) will show you updates so that you can quickly respond to unplanned down times and performance issues before all hell breaks lose.

Site24x7 smart phone app offers you the convenience of monitoring the status, availability and performance of your servers and websites from multiple locations across the globe, identify performance issues and take corrective actions before it affects end users

<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/70238_IPHONE.png”><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-503" alt="IPHONE" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/70238_IPHONE.png” width=”334″ height=”163″ />

Some of the key features of the App:

• Track your server status on the move
• Track the availability and performance of your websites from multiple locations across the globe
• Track availability and current status of configured monitors in simple steps
• Identify performance issues faster and take corrective actions
• Receive instant alerts on your Android/I phone via push notification
• Get to know what caused the downtime based on webpage screen shots, Traceroute, ping analysis and DNS analysis

So when you plan to head outside on a trip to watch a game, all you have to worry about is the availability of your favorite seats at the stadium.

For those of you who haven’t jumped on the smart phone bandwagon, let us know. Site 24X7 can be made Windows friendly too. We also have the mobile web interface for you to check the updates where ever you go. So go ahead and enjoy the game. After all such opportunities don’t come by often.

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Where is your website hosted – in the country where you live or somewhere else? Regardless of where you live, chances are pretty good your site is hosted in the United States. According to a recent <a href="http://royal.pingdom.com/2013/03/14/web-hosting-countries-2013/”>study, 42% of the world’s top 1 million sites are hosted in the U.S.

But what percentage of sites with a given country code top-level (ccTLD) domain, such as .se for Sweden or .jp for Japan, are hosted in that particular country? As it turns out, people in Germany, South Korea, and Vietnam are the most likely to choose onshore web hosting (hosting your website in the country where you live.)

Onshore web hosting

Following our previous <a href="http://royal.pingdom.com/2013/03/14/web-hosting-countries-2013/”>study about where the top 1 million sites in the world were hosted, we were contacted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris. It had the idea to see how many sites with a particular ccTLD are actually hosted in the country with that ccTLD. In other words, for websites with ccTLDs, how common is onshore web hosting? Hence this study was born.

Why look at only ccTLDs? Because by selecting a ccTLD for their website, arguably a website owner identifies themselves and their site with that country.

You can read more about our methodology at the end of the article, and you can see the compiled data <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AsDrQsdrVZikdDlkQnJOWmhyQTBGTGFiOTNnMW1fUFE&gid=0″>here. But let’s start off with a summary in the form of a world map (the redder a country is, the higher percentage of ccTLD sites are hosted onshore.)

<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-21544" alt="onshore web hosting map” src=”http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/e3751_pingdom-cctld-hosting-world-map1.jpg” width=”580″ height=”445″ />

Highest percentage of sites hosted in country

The number of sites hosted in each country as shown above is interesting but let’s take that one step further. Here is a list of the top 10 countries with the highest percentage of ccTLD sites hosted in their respective country.

<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-21546" alt="onshore web hosting” src=”http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/dadd0_hosting-in-out.0022.png” width=”580″ height=”340″ />

This means, for example, in the case of South Korea that 97% of websites (in the top million) with a .kr ccTLD are hosted in South Korea, 93% of the sites with a .vn ccTLD are hosted in Vietnam, etc.

Some things worth highlighting:

• It is notable that Germany and Japan are also on the list of the ccTLDs that have the most sites in the top 1 million (see below.) It would seem that website owners in those two countries really prefer to host websites at home.
• Comoros (km), North Korea (kp), and Swaziland (sz) actually have 100% of their sites hosted in their respective country, but we’re only talking about 1, 3, and 2 sites respectively.
• 65 countries have none of their sites hosted in their respective country, biggest one is Tuvalu (tv) with 3,387 sites, followed by Montenegro (me) 2,260 sites, and Cocos Islands (cc) 1,607 sites.

Most number of sites in total

To round off this study, we’re simply listing the ccTLDs that have the most sites in the top 1 million.

<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-21545" alt="onshore web hosting” src=”http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/1ec1b_hosting-in-out.0012.png” width=”580″ height=”340″ />

To put this in perspective, out of the 1 million sites we looked at in total, just over 509,000 were on the .com TLD.

Is onshore web hosting even an issue?

Arguably the widest selection of different web hosting options is available in the U.S. and the country’s domination in the industry is crushing. But if you don’t live in the U.S. you may want to host your site in the country where you live for a variety of reasons: access, language, legal issues, payment options, latency and performance, etc.

We find it very interesting to see how this varies so much between countries. From the 97% of .kr sites being hosted in South Korea to the 71% of .se sites being hosted in Sweden and beyond. Clearly, on the other end of the scale, that so many sites with ccTLDs are hardly or not at all hosted in their respective country, also tells us something about the global web hosting market.

What about you? Do you host your site in the country where you live, and are you doing that for any particular reason? Let us know in the comments below.

About the methodology: To be able to answer the question posed by this study, we scanned all the sites in the Alexa top 1 million list for where they are physically hosted. All in all, we managed to scan 947,461 sites. From that list, we removed all gTLDs (Generic Top-Level domains), including. com. We also removed sites for which there was no identifiable country or TLD. That left us with sites using a ccTLD (Country Code Top-Level domain). This means, of course, that in practice the United States is not included in this study (except the few sites using the .us domain). The primary reason for this is that we were interested in the relationship between country-specific websites and where they are hosted. Including the .com domain would have meant more sites were included in the study but it would arguably also have made the results less reliable. All in all, included in this study are 309,129 sites split up over 230 countries.

Image (Top) via Shutterstock.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

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