If you are already familiar with our flagship products this would be a walk in the park for you to implement. To get things rolling you simply need to fill our online form. Once you submit it, you will hear back from us within 48 hours.

Who is the program intended for?

Everyone can participate in our affiliate initiative. Of course, the more relevant your site is, the more you will benefit. Depending on your audience, you can promote any, or all of our four major services. For those of you not familiar with our service, here is a short description of each:

• Server Monitoring – Server uptime is critical for various services to run. People, who subscribe for this service, set short monitoring intervals to gain good resolution and information about the performance of their hardware. Shorter intervals translate into slightly higher fee with each step, due to the resources they take to execute. This ultimately translates to better and stable commissions.
• Website Monitoring – End-to-end webpage performance test and 24/7 website uptime tracking. Clients may initially add only a handful of sites, but numbers tend to grow over time. This service is scalable and affiliate fees can increase steadily.
• Application Monitoring – Human experience is simulated when dealing with single and multistep application forms. It is not enough for a site to be online. It also needs to function. If a client monitors the uptime of a website, it is highly likely they are monitoring the state of at least one application form. Promoting this service holds the potential for good commissions.
• Email Monitoring – Tracking the wellbeing of your electronic mail services with scheduled round-trip test. Email monitoring is an integral part of each online ecosystem. Monitoring it, alongside your other assets, is essential.

If you are already participating successfully in other affiliate programs, ours works pretty much the same way. The best way to know if our program would work for you is to give it a go.

Each affiliate is given a unique tracking URL to use according to our terms and conditions. To maximize the effect, we advise you to place your tracking link in visible areas of your site, embedded within content, share them on your social profiles and include them in newsletters. You can also customize our tools and badges to make sure that any click through conversions are accounted for.

Affiliate Options

Without further ado, here is what we offer to our prospective affiliates. You can choose from 3 available commission plans.

• One time commission – You will get 20% of the first paid invoice of each referred client
• Limited time commission – For 3 months you will receive 10% of all paid invoices. The amount people tend to pay increases within one quarter, so this is a balanced solution for people looking to get more in a short period of time.
• Lifetime commission – 5% each month, for as long as you are participating in our program.

We reserve the right to craft custom commission plans with different accounts. This is a good thing. In time, we hope to extend our communication with you and provide you with even better means of compensation.

Tracking & Payment

With each option you will get detailed information about the current engagement of your leads. You will be able to login to our tracking system and check on the sales activity and commissions earned. Commissions that have been due for over 30 days and are over $ 50.00 will be eligible for claim.

Be one of the first to sign up to the program. Sign up today and we will process your application in under 48 hours!

This year was particularly interesting because of the significantly higher online demand for service and products. Notice the spike in 2012. Search for mother’s day gifts are through the roof. We bring you attention to this fact so that you could take into account the higher overall demand, when looking at the results.

Notice the spike in 2012

Performance Monitoring Methodology

For the purpose of the report we use fullpage web transaction, simulating end users’ engagement with the monitored websites. The reporting period covers a significant period of time, prior to the holiday and Mother’s Day. Website performance and availability measurements are scheduled for the most common web transactions at 15 minute monitoring intervals. The WebSitePulse application monitoring service is used to collect data and to create the reports. Average response time and website uptime are measure from San Francisco, Chicago and Washington. Average totals are then calculated and presented.

Results from 2011

In order to make sense of the current results, let’s look back to the results from 2011. Our Mother’s Day 2011 report was the most noxious one to date. Total average response time varied between 14.118 and 29.996 seconds, depending on the location and website. ftd.com, one of the retailers we monitored, was online 100% of the time, yet it took ~30 seconds to serve its visitors. Those sites could have really done better. Full list of results is available here. We have been performing the same tests since 2008. In all previous years the sites performed considerably better, with response time averages below 4 seconds.

Results from 2012

This year we had better results than those from 2011.Considering the constantly increasing demand for online services, it would be safe to say this year the sites performed considerable better than last year, even though not as well as previous years. This year uptime was hardly an issue for any of the monitored online retailers. Looking at the average response time for the entire test period (05.05.2012 – 05.12.2012), we can see that our new entries are performing formidably well. Results are getting better across the board. You can see how even ftd.com and teleflora.com are able to keep up, despite the higher demand. According to the table, businesses are taking measure to make sure that they are able to meet the demand.

Conclusion

According to our test, fromyouflowers.com outperformed all other sites without any downtime. Sees.com did particularly well in San Francisco but it had the worse uptime of all websites. 95.686% is a lot.

Online business is never predictable. Often demand and resources don’t match, and it is particularly harmful for a business not to be able to serve its clients. In many cases, being proactive is the key to overcome future problems with your website. Not being able to provide your content never goes unpunished in peak moments.  Regular maintenance, optimized code, a lot of performance tests, and remote server monitoring can be just as valuable as a good product, friendly customer service and affordable prices. We really expect to measure an improvement in 2013. This year’s results are good and it is clear that retailers have been busy improving their sites.

How is China coping with the Golden Shield vacuum? They mimic the concept of existing services, build upon them and offer internal solutions to Chinese citizens.

• Google Drive – 5GB of Google Docs plus whatever you feel like sharing with Google. For a free service it would be OK, but I won’t feel okay with Google being able to use my content if I pay for the storage.

What China offers:

• Wangpan – The “Google of China”, Baidu, offers Wangpan – the Chinese word for “your only viable option”. All attempts of witticism aside, Wangpan offers 15GB for free. With most options removed by default, it seems like a pretty decent offering. According to online sources, Baidu will embed Wangpan to Yi (Android derivative). Baidu are up to something. When you search for “wangpan” you’ll get a lot of results from sites such as Forbes.

• Dropbox– 2GB which get to about 18GB, media streaming, Linux & Blackberry clients included. This service is quite popular, every now and then offering perks to help free users boost their space.

What China offers:

• Kanbox – Think of Kanbox as the Chinese Dropbox. The similarities are too many to be ignored. Even the homepage has the same concept. The service offers the same features as its non-Chinese counterpart. Unlike Wangpan, anyone can register. There is no hype around limited number of daily invites as the service is already well established. After receiving 20 million in venture capital in Q4 2011, Kanbox is definitely about to up its game.

• Skydrive – 7GB of storage and a not-so-nasty 2GB file size limit. It is rare to see Google have a nastier policy than Microsoft. In this case I would feel better with Skynetdrive. Also one of the few Windows Phone options.

What China offers:

• 360 Cloud Disk – Here is our last entry. 360 Cloud Disk offers the whooping 18GB, extendable to 36 absolutely free. The only limitation is that your file needs to be below 5GB, which is ok. This solution can also be considered pretty safe. It has been developed by a company mostly known for its antivirus and security solutions.

Of course, one might say that the Chinese are missing out on some of the other great cloud storage services out there, such as Box, SugarSync, Insync, etc., but three good free cloud storage services are more than what most countries have. Then again China has no decent access to the first set of service providers. The best thing about all services listed here is that Chinese or not these services are free and would aid anyone who is after a decent backup for their personal data. If you are about to travel to China on business and need cloud storage, you should probably try to copy your essential data to one of their cloud storage counterparts.

Speed and technical availability of the Chinese cloud storage services seem to be the last thing to worry about. Still, it is good to remember that The Great Firewall monitors all internet activity in mainland China. No matter what cloud storage service you use, you should check if it is available in China. You can do this with our China firewall test. Note that sometimes the services seem available and you should run multiple tests. Dropbox can be accessed by some platforms and locations, but completely unavailable in others. It has to do with China’s firewall not being that great. No pun intended.

This video is part of our Monitoring Video Tips series.

This video is part of our Monitoring Video Tips series.

Liked this tool? Try it out!

If not, our Web Page Test tool can help you find out. With this test our monitoring agent shows how long it takes to download the complete HTML content, the images and all the other internal web page objects. Of course, it also measures the download speed of each of the components. The test results show the DNS time, connect time, first and last byte times for each of the web page objects.

In the video below you can see how this test works. And don’t forget that you can use this and more of our free tools and services by signing up for a 30-day full-service free-trial account with us.

This video is part of our Monitoring Video Tips series.

Liked this tool? Try it out!

This video is part of our Monitoring Video Tips series.

Liked this tool? Try it out!

This video is part of our Monitoring Video Tips series.

Liked this tool? Try it out!

We provide several DNS Tools to help out with some important questions:

• What’s the IP behind this domain name?
  • With the HostName test you immediately get the IP behind a domain. This is also a great way to verify that the DNS records are correct and specific domain points to the correct IP address.
• Where did this email come from?
• The MX Lookup test returns a list with servers responsible for delivering e-mail to that address and their priority relative to each other. You can now see where this nasty spam came from.
• Who is in charge of this domain name?
  • If you are curious to know who owns a domain, you should use Whois. Nevertheless, you can also take advantage of the NS records lookup test. It will return the NS servers managing the domain name records for that certain domain. It is a great tool to verify DNS records when transferring a domain from registrar to another. Also if you are purchasing a domain it is good to double check on the name servers, once you set them.
• What is the host behind this IP?
  • The Reverse DNS test is the exact opposite of the HostName test. You enter any IP and you get the host associated with it.
• How can I trust that IP address?
  • Every now and then you will face a site you don’t actually trust. You can use the HostName tool to check the IP behind a website. You can then copy the IP and paste it in our Blacklist Check tool. We query the major DNS Blacklists – Sorbs, Spamhaus, NJABL, DSBL, CBL and PSBL for specific IP address and returns whether it is listed for sending spam, as an open proxy relay or for other possibly malicious activities.

These tools will help you troubleshoot common problems and find problems where you would rarely look. Even if your server is working perfectly and the sites are beautifully written, it would not mean a thing if something as simple as your DNS server goes down. In a world without DNS we would had to type in 69.20.11.136:80 just to reach www.websitepulse.com. Now, give the tools a try and let us know what you think about them. We hope you find the useful!

There is a good reason to change to DC, at least for data centers. Most of the hardware in a data center runs on Direct Current. Since the power grid offers predominantly Alternating Current, conversion from AC to DC needs to take place before consumption. In the conversion process electricity is lost. DC data centers are between 10 and 20 percent more efficient that their AC counterparts. Switching from AC to DC direct infrastructure eliminates three conversion steps in the electrical system, and also reduces the load on the air conditioning by the reduced amount of heat being created in the conversion process.

There is also one great benefit to DC data centers – real estate. With DC infrastructure you can save between 20 and 40 percent floor space, leaving you plenty of room for further expansion.

Most of our electronics run on DC. Windmill power goes through batteries before reaching is, so does solar. It is basically DC converted to ac and then converted back to DC again, just so we can plug in our hardware. It actually makes great sense to switch back to DC.

The big players are already doing it. Facebook adopted a DC architecture in its Prineville, Ore., data center. SAP spent $128,000 retrofitting a data center at its offices in Palo Alto, Calif., to rely on DC power. In 2010 this move cut SAP’s energy bills by $24,000 per year.

Major names are catching up with the trend pretty fast. ABB bought a controlling interest in Validus DC Systems (manufacturers of data center DC equipment), while General Electric bought Lineage Power.

With the conversion cycles down from 5 for AC to DC to only 2 for DC, things look bright for data centers. More efficient, less hardware, more space, easier maintenance. It all seems pretty good. The cost for the end-user is bound to go down in the next couple of years.

Data centers become more and more reliable. Nowadays, small and midsize businesses tend to trust data centers for their computing needs. There are a number of reasons why you still need complete server monitoring solution, despite all advancements in the IT industry. Test any of our services for 30 days and let us know what you think.