Zoho Revisited: Site 24x7

After my previous post about Zoho, the good people at Adventnet contacted me using the comments features of this blog regarding my registration problems with Zoho.  Well, after a quick exchange of emails, I was in! (thanks guys!)

The real reason why Zoho piqued my interest was its website monitoring feature called Site 24x7.  Site 24x7 allows its users to monitor websites and should anything goes wrong with the monitored sites (slow response time, downtimes, defacement, etc.), Site 24x7 will send an email alert informing of the problem.

Setting up a list of website on Site 24x7 is very easy (actually, a no-brainer).  Just provide the URL of the site you wish to monitor and the frequency (number of times) of access and that's it.  Should your website require authentication, it has an option to enter a user ID and password for such purpose.  Once you are done with this phase, all you need to do is just sit and relax.

If one of the websites you are monitoring happens to experience some problems (slow response time or the server went down), Site 24x7 will send you an email informing you of the problem.  A visit to their site will show statistics about the websites you are monitoring such as availability, maximum, minimum and average response time and history.

This service is an invaluable tool for an "ambulant" systems administrator like me since I'm alerted if anything is wrong with any of the websites I monitor.  It frees me to do other things since I no longer have to stare at a computer monitor to check on the health of websites.

I hope to get some more free time on my hands so I can do a review on the other services available at Zoho.com.  Hopefully with Site 24x7, that free time will be available to me soon.

technorati tags:Zoho, Zoho-suite, Site-24x7, website-monitoring, systems-administration

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