BLOGS@DiGiTSS » Reviews

Best Free Website Uptime Monitor

Dharmavirsinh Jhala — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 17:31:44 +0000

I came across a post on Mashable about an article on 10 Free Website Uptime Monitoring services, out of that I have analyzed and found 2 of them the best free solution out of all. One is UptimeRobot and another one is pingdom. Whether you have single website or multiple, if you want to check and monitor uptime of your website to verify the reliability of your web-server or hosting company then you should deploy up-time-monitoring service for your website/web-application. If you are running critical application than one should consider buying or using one for monitoring them.

Let me give you some idea about both the services:

UptimeRobot

UptimeRobot is completely free service for monitoring websites.

# of websites you can monitor per account: 50
Check Interval: 5 minute
Alert by: email, sms, rss, twitter

UptimeRobot looks at your site header’s status codes every five minutes and if the code comes back with a problem, does further checks. Then, if there are still issues, it lets you know about it pronto. According to about-us, they will try to keep this service free as long as possible.

pingdom

pingdom is commercial monitoring service but it has a free sign-up with limited # of monitor. Basic free account let's you monitor 1 website. It comes with free iPhone application and monthly summary report as email.

# of websites you can monitor per account: 1
Check Interval: 1 minute
Alert by: E-mail, SMS (up to 20 per month), push alerts via iPhone app

I like that it allows you to select the time interval between 2 checks and the big deal is that at minimum you can select interval to 1-minute. The configuration is great and you can configure URL by HTTP/S or custom HTTP/S where you can set the PAYLOAD. We can choose between HTTP, TCP Port/Ping/DNS/UDP, SMTP/IMAP/POP3. See URL configuration screen below:

pingdom - URL configuration

I would say it's worth trying and buying if one is running with critical business application over the Internet.

Another winning point pingdom has is that monitor checks uptime from the server's located all over the web and it give you idea about response time from many locations in the word. (I saw that every minute check was from different location/server, ranging from various states in the United States to UK and many other countries.)

While UptimeRobot has deployed 2 server's when URL is reported as failed from one server they will have it verified on another and will be reported as failed only if it fails on both the server.

To be on safe side 4 weeks back I have deployed both pingdom and UptimeRobot for one of the critical web-application and when I saw monthly report 100% uptime, it was happy moment for me to see that.

How is your experience with website uptime monitoring system, you might have tried so far?

I would say if you're running with critical business application which you can't afford to have down for a minute than go pick pingdom, but if you're enthusiast who wan't monitor websites to make sure they are almost up try UptimeRobot or deploy both.! Similar Posts:

Acronis Disk Director 11 Home Worked for me..!

Dharmavirsinh Jhala — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 08:16:58 +0000

Acronis Disk Director Home

This week Monday late evening I came to know that my hard-drive has encountered some problem which was working well till last Sunday evening somehow. What all I remember which might have caused this could be my successful experiment to shift one of my extended partition to primary partition to increase the primary partition size. That time I have just Googled-up to find out a free-software to help me out for that. I Googled-up and found Partition Wizard Home Edition Free which can do the job for me. Not to say I had partitioned my 400GB partition into 8 partitions and just with the help of Partition Wizard HE - Free I pumped 50GB more into my primary partition C-Drive. Which was okay for several days but after few days I got dumped.

My partition-table was corrupted and while booted Monday I came to know that no other drive except C -Drive was visible. I was 99% sure that I will get my data back but was just looking for the Right-Tool to do that. After downloading several tools and tried all of them but not much luck. I was ready to spend some dollars but could not find the right tool. My old favorite PC Inspector File Recovery was not able to help either. Then one of my colleague Girish Parmar suggested me to use Acronis for the job. I knew that Acronis is there and I have used it few years back in the time of Partition Quest Magic 8 but it was history now.

I have downloaded Acronis Disk Directory 11 Home and initially I thought it won't work. But then I got another HD plugged in took a risk to Initialize my old HD again and after that tried using Acronis Recovery Expert again and w0000t! it just worked for me. I was able to recover all my partitions in several trials in two go.

Acronis Disk Director 11 Home at Work

I would like to recommend Acronis Disk Directory 11 Home and Acronis Products to everyone who is in need of their Partition Recovery. It's a very efficient tool and does the job perfectly.

My Vote goes to Acronis.

What tool do you vote for (For data/partition recovery)?Similar Posts:

New Digg is here..! It’s Monster.. But What’s new?

Dharmavirsinh Jhala — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:41:50 +0000

New Digg - The Monster

Okey, the wait is over. New Digg is here..! Oh I just got this email last night which I have checked today.. and when I saw that new Digg is here out of their beta. I can't wait but went out to try it all and signed in to my existing account.

What I saw is it really is cool. What you will notice is that it is going the twitter way.. You can choose people you follow and others can follow you..! It's kind of more or less what almost every other social-blogging or micro-blogging website is being built on top of...

What I have noticed on the first view is:

New Digg Logo

New Logo & UI theme/design: Digg has got little Web 3.0 styled logo and new design. Looks pretty much nice though UI design is on top of classic design but has got that punch.
Find Friends to Follow and make Followers: As I said find friends to follow and let them follow you. It has got Google, facebook and twitter connect. Once you login first time in a new digg it lets you choose accounts you can follow based on your taste. Then let's you find friends on other social-networking or micro-blogging websites you might be using.
New way to submit link: Now posting link is simpler (damn simple..) and faster. It's not crawling through it's database to find duplicates now..! Which has saved up huge time. It' really fast and I am loving it.
Auto-Submit Stories: Go to Settings > Import Feeds > [ Enter Your Website ] and choose a topic. It's that easy, it will require you to copy paste a key in your blog post to verify it's yours. That's it you're done. I loved this feature. Not just one you can have multiple blogs, as long as you can claim yours.
Easily share your story: You can easily share your stories on twitter or facebook.

So what's your vote and what feature you liked in this new DiGG (DiggV4) and what feature you liked in old DiGG (DiggV3).

"Load More..!" is a feature similar to our dZone and twitter.. which is not much newer but very adoptive alternate to pagination with Web2.0 or Web3.0.

Worm Welcome to new Digg - What's your buy on new DiggV4?

This is just my first view on New DiGG, let me know what feature has won your vote with diggV4.Similar Posts:

Open Source – Web Office: OpenGoo

Dharmavirsinh Jhala — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 09:11:53 +0000

OpenGoo is a open-source Web Office software built with PHP and MySQL. It uses extJS as Javascript framework and it's gadgets for presentation layer, which makes it's look and feel great. Though it is bit heavy when transferred on the wire. But can serve as an alternate to Zimbra or Google Docs and office applications.

It's PHP & MySQL and so would be easy to deploy on any environment while for Zimbra you have to use RedHat or CentOS as a platform. It is very feature-rich with lots of feature listed below here from the official website FengOffice.

OVERVIEW

The Overview shows a summary of management information. It displays relevant information like: schedule of coming and current activities, running tasks, overdue and pending tasks, recently added or modified documents, latest messages, comments and conversations, e-mails, and more.

WORKSPACES

Workspaces allow individuals and teams to organize their data and tasks, and share them with other people. They can be linked to Clients, Projects, Products, Services, Departments, etc. You can define many levels and sub-levels of Workspaces. Visually identify your most relevant Workspaces, quickly, by assigning different color labels.

NOTES

Notes are an easy way to register and share comments over any piece of information. They are very useful for: tracking the conversations maintained with third parties, assessing the client satisfaction about quality, tracking a physical document, etc. A note could be entered by any user, and can notify others about it by e-mail.

E-MAILS

The e-mail follows the traditional scheme with one or more addressees who exchange messages. Additionally, users have the possibility of sharing the message with others by sending the message to a shared workspace. E-mail attachments are automatically stored as Documents.

CONTACTS

The contacts module manages the information of all organizations and people linked to your company. The contact list can be filtered by a specific workspace, by tags, or in a general manner.

CALENDAR

The calendar allows scheduling an agenda of events, milestones, tasks with deadlines, and meetings. It can be displayed daily, weekly or monthly. The schedule could be shared amongst the users who have the correspondent privileges.
You can see the schedule of events in general or specifically for each workspace or tag.

DOCUMENTS

Feng Office allows you to store and share all types of documents. The system keeps record of the different versions, comments, and a controlled access to optimize the work of people who collaborate on a document. Text documents and presentations can be created or edited directly in Feng Office without the requirement of any additional software in your computer.

TASKS

You can track every task, sub-task and milestone that is part of a service, project or activity. The system provides quick access to the tasks, grouped by state (pending, behind schedule and completed), priority, assigned person, and more. Tasks can be grouped using milestones, setting common deadlines and improving project management.
It is possible to notify a person who is assigned a task by e-mail. All the information linked to a specific task is available at a single click.
You can create a template out of a set of tasks and sub-tasks, improving the adoption of standard procedures.

TIME TRACKING

The system allows the tracking of hours for each workspace, sub-space, task and user. Reporting capabilities allow to easily produce a list of hours for any time period, users and workspace.

WEB LINKS

Web-links are hyperlinks to external Websites. They can be classified by tags, linked to other information and assigned to any number of workspaces.

SEARCH & FILTERS

The information can be quickly accessed using the integrated search engine, or it can be found using the filters of type, tags or workspaces.

USER' ADMINISTRATION

You can modify, register or create new users through the user panel. You can create and modify groups of users and group or individual permissions, making available only the relevant and corresponding information to each user.

LINKED INFORMATION

All the information managed by the system can be linked, assuring no element is forgotten or goes unnoticed. One document can have messages linked to it -or a meeting can have documents- and so with every element of the system, thus creating infinite data management possibilities.

From all of them I really like Tasks (which has got milestones and sub-tasks), Calendar and Custom Reports. Web-links and other features could be still improved. Hopefully we will see lot of improvements in future releases.

Similar Posts:

Writing better (performing) code..! What is that?

Dharmavirsinh Jhala — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 09:15:18 +0000

What is good code? The one which is following best programming patterns or the one which just does it's job simple what is required?

Better Code

Writing a better code everyday is every programmer's job and dream. A Programmer should learn from his past projects and experiences every time he start or initialize with something new. Whether it is using Patterns to solve common problem or be it writing reusable generalized code.

When it comes to writing generalized code/solution the programmer/developer has to think from wide perspective about the problem and divide the solution in a way that it could be used in other alternate situations which are not seen as of yet but could arise in future.

As programmer gains experience he learns from his experience what works out and what not in various situations. Experience teaches a Leader/Programmer by problem. The more no of problem one faces it helps him learn faster by solving them. It highly depends on the kind of work/project (enviornment) one is dealing with..!

Performance Tuning

Recently Vance Lucas wrote on his artical that early performance benchmarking is a disease but actually it is not really. I believe it depends on the kind of project you are dealing with. Although his post has targeted my one of the PHP Performance Tips artical which was related to "Writing better code with PHP... although some of them might not be useful with newer PHP versions but it does really matter.

But the question is if you/clients are more concerned about the performance which in most cases will be than it is good to start thinking about Performance from the day one. I know about firms/companies or clients looking at the Language/Tool/Framework benchmarks before taking decision on which tool/language to choose for the Project. This approach is better than crying after spending time, efforts and money on it.

Actually no one likes build a software which is great by architectural design but when it comes to performance it is real dull.

Conclusion:

Although this artical dosn't provide any tips to improve code in any language but in the end I can say that evaluating any code to Bad/Better/Best Code is relative and depends on the criterias and cases you are evaluating with. Work quality is relative to demand. As anytime we can't have good, cheap and fast all together.

Ultimately the Good code is which performs it's job perfectly and is easy to maintain in future. (It includes writing test cases and following proper commenting and everything..)

Readers' comments and thoughts are welcome as I would like to hear from you as well.Similar Posts:

OpenOffice.org 3.0 released

Dharmavirsinh Jhala — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 19:21:20 +0000

OpenOffice.Org 3.0 is released this monday and it's doing well. As I have seen early this week that due to unexpected download their engineers got to work on their website to manage the load. When I am writing this the website is back to it's normal and they have openoffice.org has recovered from the crash. They managed to allow download open office even when the site was down.

Now when it comes to features I am not able to try much with it but yes I have upgraded from 2.4 to this new release 3.0.

There is new start center with various applications grouped up.
Calc can have 3 times more columns then 256 in previous versions (1024 now).
Microsoft Office 2007 file format support: So now we can open *.docx files from Microsoft Office 2007..!
Solver and new theme in Calc.
Native tables in Impress.
Pretty Notes in the Margin and multiple page views in Writer

I have never tried with XML forms or ODBC connection for database previously but I got connected with my Sybase db and I was able to check all my tables and views from there. It was cool although procedures and triggers were not available but it was nice that we can even design forms in Open Office Database.

More on this.. may be this weekend..Similar Posts: