Uptime check comparison page is just released together with some small UI/UX fixes and enhancements!
If you haven’t seen it yet, just log in or register to our app!
Simply find the test you want to compare and click the compare button.
You can compare single test (for countries comparison) or up to three tests at the same time.
For our internal uptime checks, it looks like our main web app is loads faster without CDN ? (as you can see in the movie)
New quarter, major changes!
Content checker (full website scan) is getting out of an experimental stage. It means we will start charging for those tests, starting this weekend.
If you don’t want to be charged, please remove your tests before Sunday.
Pricing for those tests is as mentioned on the home page: 0.0001€ per unique link (1€ for a website with 10000 links).
We keep the crawler links limit for now (10000 links is current max capacity). This will change in the future.
Thanks to an awesome feedback we received from one of our new customers (thanks again ❤️), we’d like to announce that it will be possible to set up an uptime test with new time intervals: 2, 3 and 5 minutes cycles.
We plan to release this change later this week.
We will introduce another, third AgentSlug.com product – application monitoring. It’s something like a reverse uptime check. For this product, AgentSlug.com doesn’t call you to check if the site is live, but your application is calling us to notify that something meaningful happened.
It’s already being used for our internal health check processes. We will explain this feature further on inside.agentslug.com when it will be closed to launch.
We will support nodejs first. If you happen to have some nodejs processes that do something important to you, feel free to contact us for an invitation to closed beta tests.
The old UI is in the maintenance mode for a couple of months, now it’s the time to close it entirely. The only feature which is not moved to the new UI is the PDF reports generation. Please copy them, if you wish. We won’t support this feature anymore since the default browser PDF generation good enough for sharing the reports as prints.
Sincerely,
Simon Nowicki
Head of the AgentSlug.com
From now on, you can test your site completely free of charge with AgentSlug.com.
We have just added 5000 points for each of our users and we will do it every month for everyone. 5000 checks is more than enough to monitor a single website during whole month with 10 minutes interval uptime monitoring check. And from now on, it’s all completely free of charge.
It means that everyone gets additional 5000 checks without any fees, every month, no matter if you’re a paying customer or not.
We might change a little bit the refill policy to avoid some kind of abuse in the future. However, we can promise that everyone will be able to get a single website monitoring free of charge anyway.
AgentSlug.com is meant to be so simple that anyone can use it without any trouble.
However, there are some kind of technical terms you should actually know to understand what’s going on with your website.
This article is not for technical people, it simplifies many complicated issues.
Imagine you are looking for some company document. You know it probably exists, but you don’t really know where exactly. You just know its name. Let’s say it’s a Holiday Funding Request Form*
First thing you do is you call your colleague who works here longer than you and knows everyone. He tells you that you should call a guy from HR department. The HR guy redirects you to Finances. You go there, and you are told to be back in couple of minutes, because they are doing some maintenance and can’t serve you now.
After a couple of minutes you go back and get the proper form.
Machines works almost the same way. URLs are something like names. Unified names with whole addresses.
When you type an URL and hit the enter key, your browser sends a request to a DNS server. DNS is you friend who knows everyone or knows people who know people. DNS routes your browser to a proper server by resolving the domain name to a related IP number. Sometimes the first DNS knows the name and knows the IP. Sometimes it has to ask other DNS .
Then your request is routed to a proper server by the IP address. If the server is up and responding, it should send some response to your browser.
When the URL matches any document on server, response should contain HTTP 200 “OK” code. It means “everything is fine, here’s what you are looking for”.
If the server is down for maintenance, it should send you an HTTP 503 response. Translation of this code to the human language is “sorry, we have some issue over here, come back later”.
If the server can’t find the document, but knows where you should go to find it, it will redirect you (your browser) by sending an HTTP 301 code which means “there’s nothing here, the resources were moved to another location, you should go somewhere else”.
Machines communicate in a human-like way. They were made by humans and they are similar to humans in many dimensions.
Your server should respond properly. Imagine you are asking the finance guy for a Holiday Form. He tells you “OK, here you go” and doesn’t give it to you. It would be weird, right?
The same story is when machines speak to each other. We noticed that some websites in the maintenance mode, send HTTP 200 code with a nice “be right back” landing page. If one of the Google indexing crawlers came there during this pseudo-maintenance mode, it would identify the landing page as a regular page and switch the indexed page with the maintenance notice.
Learn more about http codes and their meanings.
* In many EU countries, companies can participate in employees’ vacation.
The AgentSlug.com idea went out after we were unable to use one of the biggest uptime monitoring service. I decided that I’d write my own simple ad hoc script, hooked to cron jobs. It worked quite well, and then, as you’ve probably guessed, I thought that we can extend it to a service with nice interface and some additional useful functionalities.
The very first script did just the uptime monitoring. There was no configuration workflow. Everything was hard-coded directly on the server.
On that foundation, during the last half year, we’ve made a nice and simple uptime monitoring service. Now we’re trying to make it even more simple.
Because uptime monitoring service seems not to be enough, we want to go further and extend the AgentSlug.com to a complementary website monitoring service. With content monitoring and other useful stuff. We’ve got some plans, but we are still gathering some feedback from our very first users.
Here is a request for you, dear visitor. If you use or will use AgentSlug.com, don’t hesitate to contact us and tell what you think. Any opinion, any idea is really important for us and we’d love to hear it.
