Just Uptime : Remote Server Monitoring

Most of us would agree that there is now a need for a more sustainable way to live in life, from reducing carbon emissions to increasing energy efficiency it seems everyone has taken up on the idea. Companies of all shapes and sizes are making attempts to reduce their carbon foot print - whether it’s reusing recycled materials or planting new trees in the Amazon it seems the world has gone carbon crazy.

Host Gator recently “turned green” supposedly powering their entire data centre of servers by wind turbines. Host Gator promoted their movement everywhere both online and in print the Host Gator logo even got in on the fun turning green briefly from the homepage. Host Gator’s decision to turn so called “green” was nothing more than a publicity stunt, let me explain. 

Data centres are by no means sustainable places, in fact data centres alone account for around a quarter of CO2 emissions in the whole of the ICT industry. In 2006 a report from the US Environmental Protection Agency revealed 1.5% of national electricity consumption came from data centres alone. 

After reading between the lines it becomes more clear that Host Gator simply purchased a shed load of REC’s (renewable energy credits) representing the energy used to power and cool the servers responsible for hosting over 1,300,000 customers on both shared and reseller servers. That’s all very well but what about the CO2 emissions actually being emitted by their machines, simply replacing the electricity used to power them doesn’t really make them “green”. 

Don’t get me wrong Host Gator had good intentions at heart, since then many web hosts have followed suit so maybe in the long run the impact could be significantly more than is apparent. The way in which they portrayed it was wrong. It came across like Host Gator’s data centre was significantly cleaner than any other data centre in the world when in fact no data centre is clean. Data centres consume a huge amount of power, each server on average emitting enough CO2 to match that of an SUV.

Constantly improving the services we offer to all of our valued customers is what Just Uptime is all about.  We are still expanding the product and its features, as well as doing a lot of optimisation on our systems and infrastructure.

Pretty much everyone in the office now has an iPhone and we want to take full advantage of the features available.  We thought it would be great if you could check the status of all your monitored servers, so we created a quick place to check your status online.

This service is available to all Just Uptime customers free of change and can be accessed from any mobile device with a web browser.  You can check out the site on http://status.justuptime.com.  I should at this stage point out that the page was developed for the iPhone and has not been tested on any other device.

Keeping it simple, the page refreshes every 60 seconds, and for more details such as the time the check was last found to be ‘Down’ and a monthly uptime % overview of the past two months, you can simply click the check name.

Check it out on your mobile device, just go to status.justuptime.com and enter your control panel logins.

Google recently celebrated their 10th birthday by re-launching Google.com as it was way back in 2001. Quite impressively, Google were able to recover the complete archived index from seven years ago, Google even teamed up with the Internet Archive to show what each website looked like all the way back then. 

According to their corporate information page, Google officially opened its doors in September 1998 although the exact date isn’t really mentioned. Google doesn’t seem too sure either stating “The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake.” Good old Google eh?

Google’s 2001 resurrected search can be found here, try out a few searches yourself. Facebook.com hadn’t even been registered, Myspace.com was an online storage platform, Napster closed its doors after its legal battle with the RIAA went in favor of the record labels and 9/11 was unheard of… Enjoy!

Luke Kendall / Marketing Manager

The world’s worst web host NoUptime.com has taken it upon themselves to verify their downtime with pride using Just Uptime’s webmaster tools! 

Unbelievably there is a web hosting company out there that guarantees no uptime, they’re so proud of their downtime they’ve carefully chosen a tag line to sum up their hosting services “deleting files since 1994”. 

Of course they’re not serious but I thought it deserved a mention in the blog anyway. No Uptime was “founded” by Stanley Shilov who we’ve had a great laugh with putting together his new 0.0% uptime badge which he is proudly displaying in the footer of his website. If you’ve got a minute to spare, head over to www.NoUptime.com.

It’s quite surprising how many people I speak to don’t realise the real impact downtime can have on your search listings. In fact it’s not just downtime Google and some of the other major search engines take into consideration when indexing and ranking each of your pages. Response time can have a big impact too, if your server is slow and unresponsive it’s pretty likely you will get penalized for it. 

Google’s most well known for penalizing individual sites for their poor performing servers, try Googl’ing around and you will find hundreds of stories where Google has not only de-ranked a site in the searches but has completely removed the site all together. 

The good news is Google will usually get round to re-indexing your website again however this may take time and if you haven’t got many back links to your site it could take even longer. 

Another problem and a common headache for webmasters is the effect the downtime can have on your organic traffic. Long term downtime and poor performance will have a dramatic impact on Google’s search results. Even if Google hasn’t got round to removing you from its index you could find yourself buried under all of your competitors competing on the same search terms as you.  

Being de-ranked in Google isn’t good for your business especially if you’re relying heavily on the organic traffic search engines bring to you as opposed to paid advertising and marketing. It can take months to regain your position in the search engines so it’s vital for every high ranked website to maintain a good uptime score.

So how do you avoid being removed from Google? Monitor your website/server in intervals of no more than 30 minutes, if using a shared server monitor in intervals of no more than 5 minutes as you’re more likely at risk. If your uptime is really important you may want to think about purchasing a DNS back up service, these services constantly grab your DNS data and act as a backup when things go wrong. Lastly, sign up to Google webmaster tools – Google webmaster tools presents all the pages that were inaccessible during a Google bot’s crawl. This is a great free way of detecting problems with pages on your website minus the alerts.

Luke Kendall / Marketing Manager

Tag Clouds

A friend of a friend had a rather impressive tag cloud made up from the Just Uptime Blog. The image was made up in Illustrator with content from a script, “Goose” from The Digital Jedi put this together in about 5 minutes for us. Its result is much nicer than any tag cloud generator could dealt with…

Luke Kendall / Marketing Manager

Here at Just Uptime we spend most of our hours working over the internet and when it comes to browsers there is always conflict in the office between FireFox & IE. There is no denying that Microsoft’s IE has a far bigger market share over any other web browser however ever since the release of Mozilla’s FireFox In November 2004, the competition has been rife. Now Google’s on the case with their new browser, Google Chrome.

According to Net Applications, Microsoft Internet Explorer has a market share of 73.81% with FireFox taking most of the remaining share – 18.43%. If the release of Google Chrome is like any other Google release, I think it would be safe to say Google is going to miss a couple of steps on the ladder and cause a bit of tension at the top! 

Anyway I wasn’t off to a good start. The video was Google Chrome video tour was “No Longer Available”. But I decided to give it the benefit of doubt and download it anyway. There was only one thing that striked me as odd about the Google browser, the absence of the Google Toolbar. Maybe Google got a bit too carried away and forgot to include it with the beta release or who knows maybe they just run out of time. I’m sure the Google Chrome, Google Toolbar (Ouch!?!) will be along soon, meanwhile I guess I will have keep my existing browser to check up on Google’s page ranking.

So the good news… Google Chrome seems to work perfectly on the Just Uptime site so you can enjoy your new browser with your favourite server monitoring & alert service – Just Uptime.

Enjoy: http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en-GB/features.html

Luke Kendall / Marketing Manager

This week Just Uptime has had an interview up on the DedicatedServerDir.com and WebHostDir.com homepage! If you haven’t already read it, head over to:

http://www.dedicatedserverdir.com/search/profile.aspx?SPID=14668

Or if you’re happy here take a read below!

What makes you different from other web hosting companies?

Unfortunately no server is 100% reliable, from time to time we all have the occasional problem. That’s where we come in… Just Uptime monitors every necessary aspect of your website or server in a bid to ensure maximum uptime. From simple response code checks to mail server accessibility, we’ve got you covered.

How do you define Web Hosting?

Web hosting is about taking responsibility of a clients project which means ensuring a reliable service is in place. Just Uptime allows web hosting companies as well as their clients to monitor their servers so that issues can be detected much earlier and resolved sooner.

Who is your target market?

Anyone who owns or manages a website or server will benefit greatly from our service. We target business owners and webmasters and we get a great response from both.

Describe what you are doing to anticipate the next year of Internet growth?

We are growing with it! Just Uptime is constantly adding more features and services to improve ourselves and offer up to date monitoring methods for all our users. A problem we found with existing monitoring services is they don’t do this enough, we love giving customers more to choose from and we are always showing off about it in our blog!

Where will you be in 5 years?

In 5 years we want to be a name that everyone has heard of in the web hosting, development & design industry. We want to provide a much wider toolset of features than anyone else whilst sticking to our beliefs on simplicity.

Why should a web developer choose you over someone else?

A large percentage of our customers are developers. We found that a large majority of developers manage their client’s websites as well as their own, a server monitoring service like Just Uptime is essential to ensure maximum uptime on the client’s site. 

Describe the support services that you provide.

We take customer support very seriously, that’s why we have direct numbers into the office for customers who require an immediate response, you only have to give us a call to see just how dedicated we are to customer service.

Luke Kendall / Marketing Manager

Good news for you fellow application developers out there, we have just added an XML report feed to ‘Webmaster Tools’ located at the bottom of your control panel.

With this XML feed you are able to display the status of each of your checks within your own application or website.

Next Step: We are currently working on extending and documenting our API which will allow for a more flexable integration between Just Uptime and your applications.

Rich, Just Uptime Lead Developer

It doesn’t seem that long ago when we unleashed Just Uptime’s server monitoring & alert service on the web and now just 7 months on, Just Uptime has had a redesign!

We found the old site a bit dull and wanted to spruce up the colours a bit so we set our minds on a new homepage that was a bit more striking to look at. Being so used to our old design it’s been hard to decide what looks best but I think we can now say we’ve achieved that.

You may also have noticed our new flash demo designed to show visitors just how easy it is to start monitoring their websites & servers with Just Uptime. If you haven’t already tried it go and take a look!

Luke Kendall / Marketing Manager