We've just rolled out a brand new feature: the ability to set rate limits on SMS alerts. Before we tell you all about it, a big thank you to everyone who has provided feedback or submitted feature requests - it helps us focus on making the improvements that people really want.
Over the past couple of weeks we've been optimising the Downtime Monkey website to reduce page load time. We've had some excellent results: in the best case scenario we cut page load time by 58% and even in the worst case, the page load was still 9% faster. All of the changes that were made are straightforward and we've provided in-depth details of the optimisations so that you can apply them to your own website.
In an ideal world every site would have 100% uptime, 24/7, 365. However, the reality is not so perfect – hardware failures, DNS issues, DDoS attacks, server maintenance, software problems and poor hosting are among the many causes of downtime. It’s not all doom and gloom though – by following a few practical steps you can really cut down on your downtime.
A short interview where Ryan Glass, lead developer on Downtime Monkey and director of Big Toe Web Design, talks about taking Downtime Monkey from idea to reality.
Setting up a new website monitor is quick and easy - we ran some tests and found that on average it takes just 5-10 seconds. Here is a very short video with instructions for adding a new website monitor using a Downtime Monkey Free account.
One of the main challenges we faced when developing Downtime Monkey was internationalization (or depending on your point of view: internationalisation, internacionalización, internasjonalisering). The aim was to provide our services to as many people as possible across the world - we learned a few things in the process and we thought we'd share some tips...
If you're reading this then Downtime Monkey is live! We're kicking-off with a short period where the site is in beta. Everything has been tested in-house so we're not expecting any surprises but there is nothing better than the experience of real users to help us improve.
8 months and 116,000 lines of code after starting out we have finally completed the development of Downtime Monkey. There is no doubt that it has turned into a bigger project than we first expected and we're very happy to have reached this stage.