Treehouse went to the Grace Hopper Celebration (#GHC19) and it was amazing. Here’s what we loved the most.

In early October, some of the Treehouse team traveled to Orlando, Florida for the Grace Hopper Celebration. The conference is the largest event in the world for women in tech. It was a massive event! Thousands of women from all...

The post Treehouse went to the Grace Hopper Celebration (#GHC19) and it was amazing. Here’s what we loved the most. appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

The `hidden` Attribute is Visibly Weak

There is an HTML attribute that does exactly what you think it should do:

<div>I'm visible</div>
<div hidden>I'm hidden</div>

It even has great browser support. Is it useful? Uhm. Maybe. Not really.

Adam Laki likes the semantics of it:

If we use the hidden attribute, we make our semantic a little better. Anybody will understand what does a “hidden” attribute means on an element.

Monica Dinculescu calls it a lie:

the hidden rule is a User Agent style, which means it's less specific than a moderate sneeze. This means that your favourite display style will override it:

<style>
  div { display: block; }
</style>
<div hidden>
  lol guess who's not hidden anymore
  hint: it's this thing
</div>

So two related problems...

  1. It's extremely weak. Literally any change to the display property other than the none value on the element with any strength selector will override it. Much like any other display property, like width or whatever, except the it feels somehow worse to have a hidden attribute actively on an element and have it not actually be hidden.
  2. The display property is sadly overloaded with responsibility. It would be way cool if hidden was a CSS property that could be in charge of the visibility/access of elements rather than the same property that controls the type of block it is. But alas, backward compatibility 4-lyfe of the web stops that (which is a good thing for the health of the web overall).

If you really love the semantics of the attribute, Monica suggests:

[hidden] { display: none !important; }

Seems like a nice addition to any "reset" or base stylesheet.

Otherwise, the classic technique of hiding things with a class is absolutely fine. I typically have a utility class:

.hide, .hidden {
  display: none;
}

But remember there are always a million ways to do things. I find myself regularly doing one-off hide/show mechanisms. For example, a menu that you need to toggle the visibility of with flair, but remain accessible at all times...

.menu {
   opacity: 0;
   visibility: hidden;
   transition: 0.2s;
   transform: translateX(20px);
   &[data-open] {
     opacity: 1;
     visibility: visible;
     transform: translateX(0);
   }
}

The post The `hidden` Attribute is Visibly Weak appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Qeexo AutoML Brings Machine Learning to Edge Devices

Qeexo, a machine learning at the edge solution provider, recently introduced Qeexo AutoML. The solution is a one-click, automated platform that performs machine learning functions on edge devices. Devices like cameras, RFID readers, and other edge products take in sensor data which is then analyzed by the AutoML platform directly on the edge device.

How to Brand Your WordPress Site

How to Brand Your WordPress SiteWhen building your website, it’s crucial to include both eye-catching branding and compelling content. After all, when a customer visits your site, you want them to form a positive impression of your company and remember it later. However, this is easier said than done. The good news is that WordPress has a lot of great […]

The post How to Brand Your WordPress Site appeared first on WPExplorer.

Use OAuth 2.0 to Secure Your ASP.NET Core App

Imagine having an app where you can write and store your notes efficiently. Today, we are going to build an app that will keep track of your notes. We’ll use ASP.NET Core to build the app. We’ll also use .NET Core’s OAuth 2.0 authentication middleware to make sure the personal notes are kept secure.

My Private Notes App

As mentioned earlier, you'll use an ASP.NET app to build your note-keeping app. Here's how the app works: The home page will keep track of all your recent notes, and if you include more than three notes, the oldest will be shelved. Once we've built the app, you'll learn how to secure it with OAuth. Read this starter project from GitHub to get started. 

6 Ways Blockchain Technology Delivers a Glimpse of Future Innovation in Today’s World

For some time now, the focus has predominantly been on cryptocurrencies and their phenomenal rise to fame. Cryptocurrencies work on decentralized controls. These controls eliminate the need for intermediaries thanks to blockchain technology. As the number of cryptocurrencies introduced to the market increase, blockchain technology continues to grow in leaps and bounds.

This is the type of technology which has the potential to change the current monetary system. Blockchain goes beyond the possibility of controlling digital currencies and offering faster peer-to-peer transactions. It is part of an advanced ecosystem of emerging technologies.

Hiding Application Properties in CloudHub

Introduction

In CloudHub, for application deployment, we normally have requirements to hide or encrypt properties. It completely depends on your preference. CloudHub resolves the properties at runtime without exposing sensitive information.

Encryption of Mule application properties is another feature and one of the easiest ways to secure sensitive information.

Angular Resolvers

What Is a Resolver?

To ensure, certain data is loaded from an API response before the route is actually activated, we use Route Resolvers.

In other words, to prefetch the data for a particular route before the component is loaded.

Login and Registration ASP.NET Web API Using Angular 8

In this article, we will learn the step by step process of creating login and registration pages in a Web API using Angular 8 using the following technologies: 

  • ASP.NET Web API.
  • Angular 8.
  • SQL Server.
  • Bootstrap.
You may also like: Angular 8: All You Need to Know.

Prerequisites

  • Basic knowledge of Angular and Web API.
  • Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio IDE should be installed.
  • SQL Server Management Studio.
  • Nodejs should be installed.

Step 1

Open SQL Server Management Studio, create a database named Employee, and in this database, create a table. Give that table a name like Employeemaster.

Mark Davies Joins Automattic as Chief Financial Officer

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and various other products, announced earlier today that Mark Davies has joined the team as its Chief Financial Officer (CFO). This news comes fresh off the heels of Automattic’s acquisition of Tumblr in August and a $300 million Series D investment from Salesforce Ventures in September. The investment round gave the company a $3 billion valuation after the funding.

Davies graduated from Western Washington University with a bachelor’s degree in accounting and earned his MBA in finance at Arizona State University. He has since worked for large companies in key roles. Prior to taking the position with Automattic, Davies served as the CFO at Vivint, a North American smart home technology company.

Vivint was founded in 1999 and claims over $1 billion in annual revenue. In 2012, The Blackstone Group purchased the company for over $2 billion. Davies came on board in 2013 and would have played a large role in growing the company’s annual revenue.

Vivint announced on October 15 that Davies was leaving the company. “Mark has created a talented and experienced finance team with a solid track record of growth and financial discipline,” said Todd Pedersen, co-founder and CEO of Vivint Smart Home. “We thank him for his six years with the company and wish him the best in his next role.”

Before joining Vivint, Davies served as president of global business services with Alcoa. He was also a member of the Alcoa Executive Council. Prior to that position, he spent 12 years at Dell Inc. in various roles. His most recent position was as the managing vice president of strategic programs. He earlier served as the CFO of Dell’s Global Consumer Group, which is a $14 billion enterprise with operations across the world. He held positions with Applied Materials and HP earlier in his career.

Davies should play a key role in helping Automattic grow beyond its current levels of revenue. He has the credentials and experience to do so.

“Automattic is creating the operating system for the web, from websites to ecommerce to social networks,” said Matt Mullenweg, founder and CEO of Automattic and co-founder of WordPress. “As we zoom past 1,100 employees in over 70 countries, we wanted a financial leader with experience taking businesses from hundreds of millions in revenue to billions and even tens of billions, as Mark has. I’m excited about working alongside such an experienced leader day-to-day to build one of the defining technology companies of this era.”

Mullenweg if often cited saying that he would like to see WordPress have an 85% share of the web. Currently, WordPress runs over 34% of the top 10 million websites. Automattic would certainly play a role in pushing the platform toward that lofty goal. He and David Heinemeier Hansson discussed the dynamics of power in open source communities and whether such a goal was healthy for the web earlier this month. In the discussion, Mullenweg clarified that 85% was a “trailing indicator” rather than a goal.

Stuart West served as Automattic’s CFO for the last seven years. He will continue working within the company, but there is no word on what that new role is. “I want to thank Stu for his significant contributions to Automattic during his seven and a half years as CFO,” said Mullenweg. “He built a talented finance team during a period of 10x growth in staff and revenue and played an essential role in the success of our company.”

Using RingCentral Toll-Free SMS APIs

RingCentral toll-free SMS APIs.

Toll-Free SMS is the ability to send and receive SMS text messages on a toll-free number. In the US, this means numbers with toll-free area codes including 800, 888, 877, 866, 855, 844, and 833. A popular reason to use toll-free numbers for SMS is that they can be used for high-volume Application-to-Person (A2P) messaging and are much easier to gets started with and less expensive than Short Codes, which require a lengthy application and approval process.

This article covers why toll-free number SMS is useful and how to send and receive messages for toll-free SMS via the RingCentral API.

Comparison Methods for Object Types, Part 5

There are special member methods — map or order methods — that we use to tell Oracle Database how to compare two objects of the same datatype. This capability is critical when we want to perform an equality test in PL/SQL or when sorting objects in SQL.

You may also like:  Object-Oriented JavaScript

There is no default way to do this. In other words, if I create a simple object type, add it as a column to a table, and try to compare or sort, all I get are errors. Let's take a look. First I will create a table that has an object type as a column and add a couple of rows.

Workflow Considerations for Using an Image Management Service

There are all these sites out there that want to help you with your images. They do things like optimize your images and help you serve them performantly.

Here's the type of service I mean.

That's a very good thing. By any metric, images are a major slice of the resources on websites, and we're notoriously bad at optimizing them and doing all the things we could to lower the performance hit from them. I'm sitting at a conference right now and Dave just bet everyone in the audience $100 that he could find an unoptimized image on their site. I wasn't about to take him up on it.

So you use some service to help you deliver images better. Smart. Many of them will make managing and optimizing images a lot easier. But I don't consider them a no-brainer. There is a lot to think about, like making choices that don't paint you into a corner.

I should be able to upload images from my own CMS.

I don't want to go to your site to upload my assets. I want to use the media management in my own CMS. So, the service should have an API at a minimum, and possible even officially maintained CMS plugins.

This site uses WordPress. I can drag and drop images into the media library and posts very easily. I can search my media library for images I've uploaded before. I like that, and I want to take advantage of it today, and as it evolves.

The images should be uploaded to my own server.

If it also has to be uploaded to the image service, that's fine. But it should go to my server first, then to the service. That way, I still maintain ownership of the source file.

Images within content should use functional, semantic markup in my CMS.

I'd prefer that the images within content are stored as totally functional HTML in my database:

<img src="/images/flower.jpg" alt="a blue flower">

It could be fancier than that, like using srcset (but probably not sizes as that will change as the design changes), or be contained within <picture> or <figure> elements... whatever you like that makes sense as semantic HTML. The most important thing being that the content in my database has fully functional HTML with a src on the image that points to a real image on my real server.

The implementation of the image service will involve filtering that HTML to do whatever it needs to do, like replace the URLs to generate fancier responsive image markup and whatnot.

Between having functional HTML and images on my server, that enables me to turn off the image service if I need to. Services have a habit of coming and going, or changing in ways that make them more or less palatable. I don't want to be locked-in; I want freedom. I want to be able turn off the service and have a perfectly functional site with perfectly functional images, and not be obstructed from moving to a different service — or no service at all.

Even if I didn't use the service in the past, I want all my images to benefit from it.

I just mentioned filtering the HTML for images in my database. That should happen for all the images on my site, even if they were uploaded and used before I started using the image service.

This probably means the services offers a URL-based "get" API to optimize images on-the-fly pulled from their canonical locations.

I shouldn't have to think about format or size.

I want to upload whatever I have. Probably some huge un-optimized screenshot I just took. If I think about it at all, I want to upload something much too big and much too high-quality so that I know I have a great original version available. The service will create optimized, sized, and formatted images as needed.

I also want to upload SVG and have it stay SVG (that's also optimized).

The images will ultimately be served on a CDN.

CDNs are vital for speed. Australians get images from servers hosted in Australia. Canadians get images from servers hosted in Canada. The servers are configured to be fast and cookie-less and all the fancy over-my-head things that make an asset CDN scream.

The images should serve in the right format.

If you serve images in WebP format to browsers that support it, you'll probably get as much or more performance out of that optimization than serving re-sized images with responsive images syntax. It's a big deal.

I want the service to know what the best possible format for any particular image for any particular browser and serve the image in that format. This is going to change over time, so I want the service to stay on top of this so I don't have to.

I know that involved formats like JPEG-XR and JPEG-2000 three years ago. Is that still the case? I have no idea. This is a core value proposition for the service.

It should optimize the images and handle quality.

This is perhaps the most obvious feature and the reason you reach for an image service in the first place. Images need optimization. There are perhaps dozens of image optimization tools/algorithms that aim to squeeze every last byte out of images. The image service probably uses those or even has its own fancy tech for it. Ideally, the default is to optimize an image the most it possibly can be without noticeably hurting the quality, but still allowing me to ratchet it down even more if I want to.

Don't shame me for using high-pixel density images.

A lot of image services have some sort of tester tool where you drop in a URL and it tells you how bad you're doing with images. Many of them test the size of the image on the rendered page and compare the dimensions of the original image. If the original image is larger, they tell you could have had savings by sizing it down. That's obnoxious to me. High-pixel density displays have been around for a long time and it's no crime to serve them.

It should help me serve the right size for the device it's on and the perfect responsive syntax if needed.

Not all images benefit from the same responsive breakpoints. Check out the site Responsive Image Breakpoints. It generates versions of the image that are best depending on the image itself. That's the kind of help I like to see from an image service. Take something hard and automate it for me.

I know I'll probably need to bring my own sizes attribute because that is very dependant on my own CSS and how the design of the site plays out. It's still important, and makes me wonder if an image service could step up and help me figure out what my optimal sizes attribute should be for certain images. Like loading my site at different sizes and seeing how large the image renders with my CSS and calculating it from there to use later.

Just me.

This is just my own list of requirements. I feel like it's fairly reflective of "normal" sites that have a bunch of images and want to do the right thing to serve them.

I didn't go into all the fancy features image services offer, like being able to tell you that an image contains a giraffe facing west and hasn't eaten since Thursday while offering to recolor its retinas. I know those things are vital to some companies. This is more about what seems to me the widest and most common use case of just hosting and delivering images in the best way current technology allows.

The post Workflow Considerations for Using an Image Management Service appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Best Website Monitoring Services

How is your website performing?

No, I’m just talking about how many visitors you’re getting or how much money you’re making. I’m referring to the actual backend performance of your site.

The truth is, factors like uptime rate or page loading speed have a direct impact on conversions and other KPIs.

Most web hosting providers will offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee. But how can you know for sure if they are meeting that promise?

The solution is simple; you need a website monitoring tool.

Website monitoring services can help you determine the strengths and weaknesses of your site. Based on this information, you’ll be able to make any necessary adjustments in order to improve your site’s performance.

Everyone with a website can benefit from website monitoring tools. It doesn’t matter if you’ve owned your site for a decade, launched within the last year, or you’re building a new website from scratch—you need to monitor its performance.

What is Website Monitoring?

Years ago, website monitoring used to be challenging. It required on-site servers and complex packages for IT departments.

Today, website monitoring is easier than ever before. Site monitoring tools are now offered as managed services. This provides webmasters with an easy to understand dashboard view of the most critical metrics of a site’s performance.

A website monitoring service can help you track things like latency, load balancing, site traffic, uptime, and other factors related to the health of your website.

Website monitoring tools can determine everything from a large-scale outage to a traffic surge on your ecommerce site.

These types of tools can help you make critical decisions when it comes to things like scaling your server capacity or allocating resources in a more cost-effective way.

Here’s the bottom line—you can’t effectively manage your website without using a website monitoring service.

The Best Website Monitoring Services

There are dozens of website monitoring tools available on the web today. How can you possibly know which one is the best for your website?

Fortunately, I’ve done all of the research for you. This guide contains the top site monitoring services for every type of website out there.

You don’t need to spend a fortune on website monitoring. I’ve included a mix of both free and paid monitoring tools to make sure that you can find one that meets your needs and fits within your budget.

StatusCake

StatusCake

More than 100,000 users trust StatusCake for website monitoring. Some of their biggest clients include Microsoft, Netflix, FanDuel, and JetBrains.

StatusCake has over 200 monitoring servers across 43 different countries. They actually have a monitoring server on all but one continent.

The reason why this tool ranks so high on my list is because it has one of the fastest testing intervals on the market today. So far, we’ve seen tools check the status of a website every minute or every five minutes. But StatusCake has an option for 30-second intervals.

In order to get the fastest monitoring intervals, you’ll need to sign up for the Business plan, starting at $66.66 per month.

StatusCake also has a Superior plan, starting at $20.41 per month. For that rate, the testing interval jumps back up to one minute.

For those of you who want a website monitoring service with advanced features, StatusCake is a great place to start. Depending on the plan you choose, you’ll benefit from things like:

  • Page speed tests
  • SSL monitoring
  • Domain monitoring
  • Virus scanning
  • Alerts and reports

Another top feature of the Business plan is access to team tools like multi-user login and audit logs.

Like some of the other top website monitoring services out there, StatusCake offers a free plan with basic features. If you sign up for free, your site will be tested in five-minute intervals and you’ll have access to root cause analysis for any downtimes.

The free plan also comes with page speed tests every 24 hours. But beyond that, you’ll need to upgrade if you want any of the advanced features.

Monitis

Montis

Monitis has been around since 2006. This website monitoring tool is used for monitoring more than 300,000 websites across nearly 200 different countries.

Major companies like Visa, BMW, and Avis use Monitis as a web monitoring solution, so you know that this is a brand you can rely on.

Its cloud-based platform is one of the best ways to monitor the uptime of your website. Since everything is run via the cloud, you won’t have to install any software or hardware to take advantage of this tool.

Uptime rates are monitored down to the minute and your history is archived for two years. It uses more than 30 check locations to monitor your site’s uptime from major markets across the globe.

Monitis runs tests using multiple protocols like HTTP, HTTPS, PING, and DNS to ensure accuracy. It also does VoIP checks, public IP checks, and email checks.

You’ll have access to daily, weekly, and monthly reports as well as instant alerts for any failures.

Monitis comes with synthetic transaction monitoring and full page load monitoring as well.

The synthetic transaction service is ideal for any ecommerce website. It simulates a user’s interaction with your checkout process to ensure that all steps are always working properly.

Monitis also includes features for RUM (real user monitoring) and server monitoring.

Pricing for these services starts at just $12 per month. You’ll get a 20% discount if you commit to an annual plan.

I like Monitis because the pricing is fully customizable. So you only pay for what you actually need. Here’s an example of some features that I selected.

Montis Features

These features would cost about $50 per month or $480 for the year with the 20% discount.

But as you can see, I didn’t include any application monitors, custom monitors, or sub accounts. These additional services would add to the price. For those of you who are running a basic website like a blog, you probably won’t need synthetic transaction monitors, so you wouldn’t be paying as much.

Overall, this is one of the best website monitoring tools on the market today. At the very least, I’d recommend taking advantage of the 15-day free trial to check it out.

Uptime Robot

Uptime Robot

For those of you who don’t want to pay for a site monitoring tool, Uptime Robot has one of the best free website monitoring solutions available.

The free monitoring plan comes with 50 monitors and two months of log history. Your website will be checked in five-minute intervals, which is pretty good for not having to pay for anything.

Uptime Robot initially launched back in 2010. For the first five years, the service was completely free.

They didn’t launch a paid version of this tool until 2015. For those of you who want faster downtime detection and more advanced features, I’d recommend upgrading to the Uptime Robot Pro Plan.

The pro version comes with one-minute monitoring intervals and up to 20,000 monitors.

Although I’m assuming that most of you won’t need that many monitors, it’s nice to know that this platform has enterprise-level solutions. The pro plan also comes with:

  • 20 SMS or voice calls
  • Two years of logs
  • SSL monitoring
  • Advanced alerts and notifications
  • HTTP type customization
  • Advanced maintenance windows
  • Custom HTTP statuses and headers

Pricing for 50 monitors starts as low as $5.50 per month with an annual plan. The price for 20,000 monitors is $649 per month, but there are more than 20 plans in between those two extremes. So you’ll definitely be able to find a price-point that fits your budget.

It’s worth noting that if you want the discounted annual plan, it only applies for the first three years of the service. After that, you can expect a 20% increase in price.

One of the reasons why I love this solution is because it lets you set custom downtime notifications. If your site goes down for 10 seconds, you don’t need to know about it immediately and waste a notification.

But Uptime Robot allows you to set your alert frequency based on how long your site has been down, such as one minute or two minutes. This allows you to ignore minor downtimes.

Pingdom

Pingdom

Pingdom is well-known for some of its free tools like the website speed test and real-time outage map. These are two things that I use all of the time.

But beyond that, Pingdom also has some great paid website monitoring services. Some of the top benefits of Pingdom’s website performance monitoring include:

  • Uptime monitoring
  • Real user monitoring (RUM)
  • Synthetic interaction testing
  • Page speed monitoring
  • Root cause analysis

I recommend Pingdom because its API integration allows you to easily automate your interactions. It’s also a top option for teams. You can set up your notifications so that the right team member is always alerted. This will drastically improve your incident workflow process.

Pingdom goes one step further by not only alerting you of a problem but also identifying the root cause. As a result, you’ll be able to fix it faster to get back up and running with minimal downtime.

There are three different pricing tiers offered by Pingdom. These are the discounted rates for an annual contract:

  • Standard — $42.12 per month
  • Advanced — $82.45 per month
  • Professional — $228.25 per month

Pricing is based on resources. Depending on the plan you select, you’ll get either 50, 80, or 250 uptime and endpoint monitors, respectively.

Advanced monitors range from 3 to 25, RUM ranges from 500,000 to 5 million page views, and user logins range from one to ten.

Unlike some of the other website monitoring services that we’ve seen so far, Pingdom’s plans aren’t as customizable. So you’ll have to pick the one that best fits your needs.

With that said, Pingdom does have enterprise-level customization.

For those of you who want more advanced monitoring options, you can add-on server monitoring for as low as $9 per month.

Montastic

Montastic

Montastic is another free website monitoring service with paid versions as well. Here’s a look at the different pricing plans.

This tool is as basic as it gets. Unlike other options on our list, it doesn’t really have a dashboard or offer any advanced features.

Montastic will simply notify you when your site goes down, and then again once it’s back up.

The free service monitors your site every 30 minutes, which isn’t as good as some of the other free plans out there that do this every five minutes.

For the most part, I’d only recommend the free version or the $5 per month plan to smaller websites. Aside from those options, I can’t really justify the cost for something so basic.

Montastic is definitely not the best website monitoring service you’ll ever see. But I included it on my list because not every webmaster has a need for extra bells and whistles.

If all you want is a notification within 30 minutes of your site going down, for free, then Montastic is a great option for you.

Uptrends

Uptrends

Uptrends is a cloud-based solution for website performance and network monitoring. They have been around since 2007 and serve major websites like NASA, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, Shell, and the Discovery Channel.

If you want a free website monitoring service, Uptrends has an option for you. Simply provide them with your email address and website to be notified whenever your site goes down.

This is one of the most straightforward and basic plans that you’ll find. Uptrends also offers a free website speed test that can be customized based on device, screen size, bandwidth, and browser. It’s one of the best free speed tests on the web today.

Besides the free tools, Uptrends has five different paid website monitoring plans.

  • Starter — Starting at $11.67 per month
  • Premium — Starting at $33.51 per month
  • Professional — Starting at $163.37 per month
  • Business — Starting at $27.95 per month
  • Enterprise — Starting at $50.57 per month

The Business and Enterprise plans allow for complete customization, you can check the interval testing frequency and buy extra monitors as well. Features like transaction monitoring and API monitoring are also customizable on these plans as well.

For those of you who want RUM (real user monitoring) in your plan, you’ll have to add that on separately. Pricing for RUM starts at $5.09 for 100,000 page views per month. This goes as high as $127.31 per month for 5 million page views per month.

In short, Uptrends has website monitoring solutions for everyone, regardless of the type or size of the site.

Uptrends stands out as one of the top website monitoring services on the market because of its customer service tools. They have an academy, knowledge base, and other resources making it easy for anyone to learn more about how to monitor a website.

Host Tracker

Host Tracker

Host Tracker is a website monitoring service that offers some unique features compared to some of the other tools on our list.

In addition to uptime reports, downtime alerts, and SSL monitoring, Host Tracker will let you know if your domain is listed on a DNS blacklist. You can also get advanced features like server load parameters for elements like CPU, RAM, and HDD.

Host Tracker automatically pauses any Google Ads if your website goes down. It will start those ads back up again as soon as your site has recovered.

Choose from one of three plan options:

  • Webmaster — Starting at $9.92 per month
  • Business — Starting at $18.25 per month
  • Enterprise — Starting at $74.92 per month

All plans come with a 30-day free trial. So at a minimum, I’d recommend using this option to explore the dashboard and take a closer look at their features.

More than 320,000 websites are using Host Tracker for site monitoring. They have over 140 monitoring locations worldwide and average over 15,000 alerts per day.

How to Find the Best Website Monitoring Service

As you can see from our list, not all website monitoring tools are created equally. Some platforms have more advanced features than others.

Depending on your needs, here are some features and factors that you can use in your decision-making process.

URL Monitoring Frequency

A website monitoring service is useless if it doesn’t track your uptime and notify you about downtime occurrences. But most services don’t track websites in real-time, meaning you won’t know the very second that your site goes down.

URL monitoring happens using interval checks. The fastest time we’ve seen is every 30 seconds and the slowest time we’ve seen is every 30 minutes.

If you have a business website with lots of traffic, you’ll want to find a plan that checks your URL status every minute, at a minimum. Otherwise, every five minutes should be fine for most of you.

Server Monitoring

Not every website monitoring service comes with a server monitoring plan. This is not typically something that’s offered for free either.

A server monitoring tool will keep on eye on resources like memory, disk space, CPU usage, and more. It’s a great way to help understand how your server resources are being allocated, and if you need to make adjustments to your web hosting plan.

Real User Monitoring (RUM)

RUM is one of the best ways to gain quick insights on how people are experiencing your website. This advanced monitoring system collects information on how real people interact with your site.

Based on this data, you can recognize strengths or weaknesses on your website. It can also help you identify and troubleshoot any problems with its performance on the user end.

Price

Like anything else, price will likely play an important role in your decision-making process. You don’t need to spend a ton of money on website monitoring.

If you have a small website or personal blog, you can get away with a free monitoring service. These plans will essentially just notify you when your site goes down and provide some basic reports.

For those of you who are willing to pay for website monitoring, plans on our list range anywhere from $5 per month for a starter plan to $650 per month for enterprise-level monitoring. There are plenty of outstanding options out there that fall within the $30 to $100 per month price range.

Conclusion

What’s the best website monitoring service? It depends on what you’re looking for.

One website will be happy with a free plan that provides basic reports, while another website might need advanced features and reports. That’s why I included an option for everyone on my list above. Here’s a quick overview of the plans on this guide:

  • StatusCake — Fastest URL testing intervals.
  • Monitis — Best for customized monitoring plans and ecommerce websites.
  • Uptime Robot — Best free website monitoring service.
  • Pingdom — Best page speed and performance monitoring.
  • Montastic — Best for basic uptime notifications.
  • Uptrends — Best for real user monitoring add-ons.
  • Host Tracker — Most unique features like blacklist notifications and Google Ads integration.

Even the paid plans on our list have some type of free trial available. So I’d recommend taking advantage of those offers before you settle on a service.

You can usually get a lower monthly rate if you lock in an annual contract. Keep that in mind when you’re going through this process.

Scrum 101: Everything You Need To Know

Excuse me? Can someone tell me about Scrum?

Whether your team is wondering what Scrum is, comparing it to other methodologies, or trying to implement big changes, this article is for you! Check out the links to popular DZone articles for everything you need to know!

What Is Scrum?

  1. DZone Refcardz: Scrum, written by multiple Scrum experts at Scrum.org, This refcard is a detailed introduction to Agile's most popular framework. It explores the theory, values, roles, and events involved with Scrum.

Integrate SSO With Spring Boot and OAuth 2.0

Integrate SSO with Spring Boot and OAuth 2.0.

Single sign-on (SSO) is the standard nowadays, regardless of industry or company size. It might be strange to think that SSO used to only be available to enterprise companies that could afford it. 

Today, with service providers like Okta and enabling technologies such as OpenID Connect (OIDC) and OAuth 2.0, developers can easily integrate SSO into their websites and apps