Service Description

MyWebAlert! monitors your web site 24 x 7 x 365 to alert you when your site goes down and to provide you with diagnostics to aid rapid resolution of problems. Imagine MyWebAlert! as being the equivalent of having your web site monitored by your customers ALL THE TIME.

Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) will not provide proactive monitoring and alerting as part of its normal hosting service. Until the arrival of MyWebAlert!, third party monitoring of web sites has either been too expensive for most to consider, or simply lacking in functionality. Key to the power of MyWebAlert! is that your web site is monitored every five minutes from one of three separate polling centres; ensuring resilience and providing comfort in the knowledge that your site will not be down for more than a few minutes without the failure being drawn to your attention.

A longer polling interval than that provided by MyWebAlert means that your web site will be down for an unacceptably long period before you get to hear about it; fewer monitor points translate to you receiving misleading false alarms. MyWebAlert IS AN INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH NETWORK MANAGEMENT SERVICE.

During the R&D phase of MyWebAlert!, 500 random sites were monitored for a period of 4 weeks and 21% found to have suffered at least one 4-hour outage. In a separate study in December 2005 targeting FTSE 1000 organisations, more than a third were found to have suffered downtime levels above accepted industry standard targets for one year; in a single month! Further studies (available at this site) revealed that retailers were failing the new e-conomy and that Government websites in the UK fair worse than any sector so far analysed.

You may not be aware that your web site can be down for a considerable period and yet still be within the limits of the high availability figures quoted by your ISP. For example, 99.5% availability could mean downtime of 1½ days per year.

Plenty of time for your website visitors to go elsewhere.

The Technical Bit - Probes, Polling & Alerting Strategy...

MyWebalert! polls your site using conventional HTTP requests, from monitoring systems hosted at 3 geographically diverse locations at staggered intervals of 5 minutes. As soon as a web site failure is detected, it is retried immediately and you are alerted if MyWebAlert! does not receive a single successful response within a 15 minute period, i.e. 6 attempts ensuring that you receive timely warnings and no false alarms.

Where you supply your domain name, MyWebAlert queries the DNS servers that master your DNS entries, checking for availability and reporting on the Resource Records held. Mis-configured or unreliable DNS servers are known to cause a significant proportion of outages.

Online Detailed Reports

To give up-to-date information on the performance of your website and to help to diagnose and fix problems you can access an online report by logging in to your account. This report contains:

• daily estimated downtime for the last 30 days
• daily number of down alerts for the last 30 days
• details of all alerts over the last 30 days
• daily estimated browse time for the last 30 days
• monthly estimated downtime, number down alerts, percent failed visits and estimated browse time for the last 12 months
• summary details of the failed visits for the last 12 months

All of this information is presented in both graphical and tabular form, and is updated on a daily basis

Monthly Management Reports

To give you an idea of how your site is performing over time and to spot impending problems coming over the horizon, you will be sent a monthly report of top level statistics, such as the number of times your site was probed and the number of failures, with a comparison against MyWebAlert!’s all-site average plus a summary of the number of alerts generated over the period. To complete the report, a simple macro is supplied to enable you to graphically represent the data in standard Microsoft documents: