Posted on July 8th, 2010 by Richard Felix —
A number of our users had some issues this morning with their sites being incorrectly reported as down, when they were indeed online. This was due to a fix that I pushed early this morning (isn’t it always related to trying to fix something?) that improves reliability of our site checks for users running a Microsoft IIS server.
The only users who were affected were those who monitor a folder on their site instead of just the domain (http://slickrframe.com/photos/index vs http://slickrframe.com). This also happens if you have a domain that looks like this: http://slickrframe.com/ instead of this: http://slickrframe.com
This issue has been resolved, new code has been pushed and if you were/are experiencing this issue, you should see your affected sites come online the next time our site checkers check your sites.
I apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused you.
Posted on June 28th, 2010 by Chris Coyier —
If you are a premium user and have an iPhone, you should be using the regular AMSU app. It has just been updated to version 3.0, which includes support for iOS4. If you upgrade to iOS4, make sure you get this update as the old version will crash on you.
Other features include a bit of a reworked interface, the ability to enter login credentials directly from the app itself, and a backend framework for us to build in more features in the future more easily.
The LITE version, for free users, has been submitted but is awaiting Apple approval. is also available!
Posted on June 21st, 2010 by Chris Coyier —
Are My Sites Up site checkers send along a User Agent when making their requests to your servers. The User Agent is this:
AMSU 1.21
This may be good for you to know, as applications and servers can be configured to respond differently to different User Agents. As long as your server and application are OK with our User Agent (doesn’t serve up an error, or anything different than a browser request), site checks will work great. It may also be good for looking through your server logs to see our site checker hits.
If you think your site checks are being affected by this and don’t have the ability to change anything to fix it, static file checking is usually the best bet.
Posted on May 29th, 2010 by Chris Coyier —
There are a lot of reasons a site might go down. One of the hardest ones to anticipate is a flood of traffic hitting your site and your server not being prepared to handle it. Fortunately, you don’t have to wait around for it to happen to prepare for it. Load Impact is a web service which can load test your site. Much like us, they have a free service you can try out, and more robust plans for users with more robust needs.
You can run a load test on your site right now for free, courtesy of Load Impact:
Posted on May 13th, 2010 by Chris Coyier —
Just what it sounds like.
Posted on February 27th, 2010 by Chris Coyier —
In general, we recommend checking the root of your site, e.g.:
http://css-tricks.com/
However, if you find that you are getting exorbitant “false positives” (down notifications when the site isn’t down) or if you have added your site and we are telling you it’s down right after adding it (when it clearly isn’t down), we recommend static file checking.
Instead of checking the root domain, check a static file e.g.
http://css-tricks.com/amsu.txt
http://css-tricks.com/style.css
The deal is that sometimes applications running on the server behave funny when we do our check. It may be because of the lack of user-agent (something we’re working on) or the fact that many applications do lots of internal redirects before actually serving up a page (we’re limited as to how many redirects we will follow) or sometimes simply because the application gives us a 404 for some unknown reason.
Checking a static file may help these issues, but still be perfectly adequate for watching for serious site outages.
Posted on February 17th, 2010 by Chris Coyier —
We recently had a request that someone wanted to have a page where their client could go see the current status of their page. This is basically what your dashboard of sites is when you log in to Are My Sites Up, but that is your private log in and you probably don’t want to give that out to anyone else.
You can make a public-facing page to display your current site statuses though! All of our premium plans offer an RSS feed for “instant site checks”, which basically means that the feed will return a list of all your sites and what the current status of them is (based on the last check).
I whipped up a quick demo page where this RSS feed is parsed with SimplePie and the results are shown in a simple table of results.
You can view the demo and download the files, if that is of interest to you.
Posted on January 25th, 2010 by Chris Coyier —
It’s been a while since we’ve thrown a new feature at you guys, but the wait is over! For our premium accounts, you now get the ability to set additional email addresses for site notifications.
Just put a comma-separated string in that area of your Settings and you are good to go. This is a premium only feature. Premium Standard gets 2 additional (so three total), Plus gets 5 additional, and Pro gets 10 additional.
In the past I’ve told people to set up mail filters to automatically forward site notification emails to multiple other emails. No more!
Enjoy!
Posted on January 5th, 2010 by Chris Coyier —
We are one of the sponsors for Better Business 2010, a major contest put on by the guys at Page Lime. The idea is to have two lucky winners win a HUGE set of tools to make their business better. So all the prizes are very usable toward that end. Over $4,000 in prizes! Check it out:
Head on over for info on how to enter.
Posted on December 18th, 2009 by Chris Coyier —
Howdy folks! We know we’ve been quiet a while. That’ll happen. We don’t have any majorly excited new features to announce, we’ve been working on the the best feature of all: speed and stability.
But that’s now why I’m writing now. I’m writing to fill you in on a few recent updates:
Free users, log in every 2 months
Remember a few months ago we sent out an email to all free users asking them to log in to keep their account active? Well we did that again, only this time it’s automated. All we ask is that you log in to your free account every 2 months to keep it active. If you haven’t logged in in one month, you’ll get a reminder. After 7 weeks, another reminder, then at 2 months with no log in we close the account. Premium account members do not have to do this.
Premium renewals
We launched in January 2009. Soon it will be January 2010. That means we will soon be coming upon the time where premium accounts are due for renewals. Two weeks before your premium account is due, you’ll get an email about it. You can then log in, go under your Settings tab, and click a button to renew. We will then add another year of time to your account. That’s all it takes! If you don’t renew, you’ll get a short grace period, and then the account will be suspended and sites will be moved out of site checking rotation. But your account will never be deleted. You’ll always be able to log in and reactivate it.
AMSU 2.6.2
The premium iPhone app has gone 2.6.2, which now includes messaging for the possibility that a premium account has been suspended due to non-payment.
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