Webmasters Can Check Server Speed Instantly with New Page Load-Tester

SAN JOSÉ, CA., February 10, 2011 – Yes, the best things in life are free! That’s why Monitis, the award-winning provider of the world’s first all-in-one monitoring cloudware, has added a no-cost instant, full web page load-testing tool http://pageload.monitis.com.

“We have a single vision in mind for our new and free instant, web page load-testing service, and that is to help Sysadmins, Webmasters and developers save time by quickly finding out about issues or problems on their sites and then fixing them immediately,” said Monitis Founder and CEO Hovhannes Avoyan. “In the end, saving time allows Sysadmins to better manage their online businesses and raise customer service levels.”

The new Monitis tool loads for speed testing a complete HTML page, including all objects such as images, Javascripts, CSS, Flash, RSS feeds, frames, and iframes and then reports back with easy-to-read bar graphs on the load time of each object(see below).

Death of the Web in Egypt: Not a Proud Moment

Last Thursday and Friday were tumultuous days for the world. Egypt, aflame with riots, its people demanding a change of leadership and reform, went black on the web.  The government shut down the Internet — ceasing Tweets, emails, YouTube postings and other sources of information to the outside world.

The country’s Internet communication simply ceased. Amazing and scary.

How did they do this? A new article on IT World says the country “raised the drawbridge” in only a few minutes, as major Egyptian networks withdrew their routing announcements to the rest of the world.  Apparently, it only required simple changes to the country’s routers.

Small Business Sysadmins to Gain Time with New Mon.itor.Us

SAN JOSÉ, CA., JANUARY 19, 2011 – Monitis, the award-winning provider of the world’s first all-in-one monitoring cloudware, will launch fully redesigned its free monitoring service, Mon.itor.Us.

“We’re celebrating the New Year by juicing up our free services and offering more extensive monitoring at no cost to Mon.itor.Us users,” said Monitis Founder and CEO Hovhannes Avoyan. “We want to help busy IT administrators at smaller companies, as well as individuals, gain more time by taking advantage of the fastest, cheapest and easiest approach to server monitoring. Ultimately, our changes are designed to make online businesses more stable and primed for growth.”

We at Monitis wish you a very successful New Year — especially to our large (over 60,000) and loyal users community! While we’re at it, we thought we’d bring you up to speed on some impressive milestones we passed in 2010 and also give you a look ahead at where we’re heading in 2011.

It’s quite an impressive roadmap we’ve got before us.

First, we had a very fruitful 2010.  Usually, we do small, tweaking updates on a weekly basis, but we also had some major releases.  Let’s take a look at some of the important developments we initiated last year:

SAN JOSE, CA., December 23, 2010 – Good news for busy IT managers on the road: Monitis, the award-winning provider of the world’s first all-in-one monitoring cloudware, today announced a new mobile downloadable application, Monitis Android App, designed to work on Google Android smart phones.

“This app is our latest tool in our mission to help busy sysadmins monitor just about any part of their IT infrastructure – anytime and from anywhere,” said Monitis Founder and CEO, Hovhannes Avoyan. “We’re dedicated to making IT pros’ jobs easier in every way, and our new Android monitoring application offers yet a greater level of convenience.”

Big News.

Can a Cloud Host Also be a Cloud Monitoring Service?

San Antonio, TX-based Rackspace, the cloud hosting company, has bought cloud monitoring vendor Cloudkick. Rackspace’s rationale in buying Cloudkick, according to analysts, is to enhance its cloud management capabilities and improve customer experience for its cloud users. Cloudkick, which is based in San Francisco and has 12 employees,  mainly works with two large cloud platforms — Rackspace and Amazon.

Analysts theorize the business benefits of the purchase: Pushing customers to Cloudkick should “dissuade users from other third-party management tools and redirect revenue to Rackspace. Tied in with this is improved mindshare. The more customers use Cloudkick versus other third-party management tools, the more they will identify with Rackspace as an end-to-end cloud provider and innovator. If Rackspace performs well, Cloudkick will allow it to draw more customers to its cloud through performance data aggregated and compared with competitors. This can be used to sell its services and also serve as a source of competitive intelligence.”

Hooray! Cyber Monday capped off a week of holiday shopping that saw more Americans choose online purchases than doing it the old-fashioned way, that is, going to the mall.

A Wall Street Journal article quoted comScore.com estimates showing a 15% gain in Cyber Monday sales from a year earlier — from $913 million last year to $1.1 billion. No wonder, Cyber Monday discounts were huge, such as the Toysrus.com 60% discount and plenty of free shipping offers. How about a 47-inch TV at Amazon.com for $599? In the article, Amazon reported that that item was sold out by Monday morning.

While online shopping is still just 8-10% of total U.S. retail shopping, it behooves website owners who want to keep profiting during the holidays to make sure that their sites are up and running and customers have a pleasant experience.

How do you do this? Choose a web monitoring service that can work non-stop and doesn’t have to depend on whether your server is up or down to gain access (because it uses the cloud). A few other important features to look for in a monitoring service:

- a quick and easy solution that you can start up fast and get working quick

- a service that lets you start small (e.g. transaction monitoring) and ramp up when you want to monitor more (e.g. transaction monitoring plus cloud monitoring plus website traffic monitoring, among other things)

- fast notifications of downtime or other problems through email, phone, instant messaging, Twitter, URL callback and other means (You’re covered; trust me!)

Have a happy holiday sales season, and make it even happier by ensuring you’re always up and running and your website apps are working and making customers smile!

Here are a few predictions about the Cloud for 2011 from an article I read that I thought I’d share with you. Some of them are quite startling. Here goes:

- Don’t Expect Cloud Standards in 2011 – Yeah, there will be drafts of standards, and possibly some ratifications by groups such as DMTF, NIST and the Cloud Security Alliance. But actual adoption of any kind of standard won’t happen…and is still a few years off.  That shouldn’t prevent you from using the Cloud however, especially when you can rely on technologies such as 24/7 cloud platform monitoring to make sure your database and apps are available and up and running.

- More enterprises will build private clouds, and they’ll continue to fail. While nobody likes to see something fail, the article suggests that this is a good thing because then companies will learn that building a cloud is a very complex task. You shouldn’t start too grand or with something too highly visible. Start small; learn and then expand.

- Hosted private clouds will outgrow internal clouds — by a factor of three to one. In 2011, private cloud service providers will be perfectly able to provide the consistent speed that a company’s employees need when turning to the cloud for performance. Why? Because they use standardized procedures that are executed by software — not your resident in-house VMware administrators.

- Information is not just power; it’s also a profit center. Of course Cloud computing helps companies gain greater insight into their data. But next year it will increasingly help firms earn money, too.  Just look at services such as Windows Azure DataMarket — designed to help enterprises leverage data sources more easily.

On that last point, the data that Monitis’ Web LoadTester provides your company is instrumental in maintaining profitability. We use cloud-computing power for instant web applications and network testing. Our on-demand Web Load Tester service helps ensure that your site’s Web pages will continue to work as designed when many visitors come — for example, the day after Thanksgiving, or Black Friday!

Why is this so important? Heavy user traffic is always good, unless your web system is under too much stress.  Web LoadTester helps you determine how your system responds to that traffic.  You can use the service at any time, day or night, to ensure that your websites and applications are ready for any number of visitors whenever they arrive.

Can I sell more lemonade on the Cloud?

Are you a small business person with responsibility for IT? And have you been considering switching to cloud data and app resources as a way to grow your business faster?

Well, here’s some encouraging testimony on how the cloud can do just that from Jimmy Harris, Managing Director of Cloud Computing at consultancy Accenture. I came across this in an article about how cloud computing is really all about outsourcing.

Harris said that, particularly for small and mid-sized companies, cloud services are ideal as a way to speeding up going to market, for example, introducing new services or products or expanding the scope of business.

He noted that Accenture is working with clients, using the notion of  cloud-enabled “minimum business infrastructure,” enabling businesses to set up operations in a new geography quickly. Other benefits: better integration of a supply chain and deploying cloud-based services into a mobile environment more quickly.

“So even while we’re still somewhat early on with this, it’s easy to see how the availability of a set of standard services being acquired and deployed more rapidly could speed products and services to market and also to new geographies and segments more quickly,” said Harris.

I certainly agree with his vision of the cloud as an enabler of growing your business, and I’d add my two cents worth: back up your cloud hopes and dreams with a system of monitoring how everything from your service provider platform (e.g. AWS) to cloud-based servers and networks perform.

And as the holiday season approaches, you’ll want to know if your web customers are able to access and easily navigate your site. It’s called transaction monitoring. Remember, the competition is just a click away.

The great thing about monitoring is that if a problem arises, such as denial of service or an outage, you get notified — quickly and through a variety of ways, for example, email, instant messages, phone, URL callback and other methods.

Dreaming of expanding your business via cloud services? Take the plunge, but have a safety plan in place with monitoring services.

In SF, Tech Heads Argue Cloud Benefits, Drawbacks

I wasn’t there personally — at the Web.20 Summit — this week, in San Francisco.  But I did read an interesting article by a San Francisco Chronicle writer who was there. And based on the testimony he heard from various industry executives, he’s come up with an explanation as to why companies are “sitting out” cloud computing.

Sure, there was positive talk among big names like Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff; Paul Maritz, CEO of VMWare; and Andy Jassy, the head of AWS.  Those guys emphasized the good and the promise that the Cloud offers — for example, flexibility, cost savings, and greater productivity.

But speaking there, too, was Rackspace CTO John Engates. He explained why companies aren’t moving to the cloud, for example:

For our part, Monitis distinguishes itself from other monitoring companies because we make it a point to define our monitoring as cloud-based — which gives our clients unlimited time savings and flexibility in monitoring their assets. By being 100% Cloud- and SaaS-based, we offer our clients universal access to continuously available tools that monitor systems and performance without high budgets and strenuous efforts. We are the first affordable network and systems monitoring solution based 100% in the Cloud.