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Latest Posts

Timestamps On Downtime Alerts

We've made a useful improvement to Downtime Monkey alerts. Each downtime alert now includes a timestamp that shows the time that the website went down and each uptime alert includes a timestamp that shows the time that the website came back up. This turned out to be more work than expected, largely because we thought we'd knock it out in under an hour :) Although it wasn't totally straightforward to develop, the end-result is incredibly simple to use...

Lockdown Bugfixes & Midnight Coding

It's been a strange few months here in Edinburgh. Thankfully Downtime Monkey has been largely unaffected by the lockdown, quietly continuing to monitor websites while the world shuts down. Coding from home has been challenging with kids off school and nurseries closed. However, in the twilight zone silent hours after everyone has gone to bed we've been developing improvements and fixing bugs. Here are the details...

Greatly Reduced Server Loads

As explained in the last post we've spent a few weeks working on small fixes and improvements, focusing on jobs that aren't urgent but shouldn't be overlooked. Here we'll look at how a few simple code changes greatly increased efficiency when serving pages on the Downtime Monkey website. These improvements focus on reducing the server's CPU load and memory use.

Monitoring URLs With Query Strings

January is a good time for bug-fixing and we've spent the last couple of weeks making small tweaks and improvements to Downtime Monkey. We've focused on the kind of bugs that aren't urgent but shouldn't be overlooked and aim to continue this for a couple more weeks before starting development of the next major feature. We'll document each change in its own post. First up is an improvement to the range of webpages available for monitoring: webpages with query strings can now be monitored...

Keeping Your Web Host Honest

All good web hosts provide their customers with a Service Level Agreement (SLA). SLAs often include an uptime guarantee where the hosting provider agrees to compensate the customer if the specified uptime is not met. However, we've never known a host to voluntarily compensate their customers - in reality it's up to the customer to ask for compensation.