Configuring SiteMon to check your website

After creating a free account, just log in and click 'Monitoring Preferences' in the SiteMon interface:

To begin continuity monitoring you first need to fill out a few details about your website:

Web Site Monitoring Preferences

You can enter and change the websites you want to monitor here. You should enter the title for the web site and three keywords present in the web site. Any changes you make are effective from the next cycle of checks.

First Web site: Type in the URL of the first web page you wish to check. URL's should be specified in the format http://www.domain.com. Should you wish, you could also specify individual pages within your website e.g. http://www.domain.com/signup.html

First Title: This should be the exact words contained within the <title> tag of the html for the chosen URL.

Keyword 1/2/3: These should be selected keywords from the target URL. Keywords are case sensitive and should be typed exactly as they appeared on your web site. Tip – for best results we recommend that you choose at least one keyword from the bottom of your target page. This way, when SiteMon finds the keyword on your page, you can assume that all the content before it was also loaded correctly.

Second Website: SiteMon allows you to fully configure a second URL for continuity monitoring. You can put this option to many uses, including -

• Checking a 2nd corporate website (e.g. http://www.domain2.com)
• Checking another page within the same website(e.g. http://www.domain.com/signup.html)
• Checking that a business partner or service provider's web site is available (e.g. http://www.my_payment_gateway.com )
• Double up your protection. If you copy the first 'website' and 'title' information into the 'Second Website' section, you will double the frequency of the checks on that site. (Tip: entering 3 different keywords in the 2nd Website fields also doubles your protection against accidental or malicious modifications to your page content)

Finally, check the 'Enabled' box and click 'Save Settings'.

That's it!

Each URL will now be tested every ten minutes according to the criteria you have specified. View a log of your test results (including server response times) by clicking 'Monitoring Statistics'

SiteMon will email you immediately:

• If your website does not respond to a standard http: request. This is the same type of request that your customers will be making from a browser like Internet Explorer. If the SiteMon request fails then your customers' requests will also fail and they will not be able to see your website.
• If the keywords or web page title are not found. If SiteMon doesn't detect your keywords then it is usually a good indicator that your web page is not loading properly. However, keyword checking also proactively identifies changes to your content resulting from accidental modification by your own workforce or deliberate defacement by a hacker.

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