Howsthe.com has made an architectural change in our deployment stack. We were using mod_wsgi and Apache to serve the static content, which was not working as well as planned. We moved to using nginx as a front end proxy and a static content server. It also acts as a gateway for the SSL connection so we don't have to run different mod_wsgi instances for HTTP connections and for HTTPS connections. Below we explain how we configured this setup.
Prerequisites:
We'll be using Ubuntu 9.04 server, the following packages need to be installed:
- apache2
- libapache2-mod-wsgi
- nginx
- subversion ( Only if you are going to install Django from SVN )
This doesn't include database installation, for this example we will not be using a database. If your application uses a database, install the correct python drivers and make sure your settings.py file is configured correctly.
Once these packages are installed, then install Django. We will not be going over this here due to expediency. You can find the directions at http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/install/.
We recently updated our subscriptions to offer new users a 15 day free trial. This allows users to try our service with no upfront charge. During this trial period you will be using your full account not limited in any way. Your credit card or Paypal account will not be charged until your trial period has expired.
If the service is not right for you, you can cancel your account at any time. If you cancel your account before the trial period expires your credit card or Paypal account will not be charged.
Like always, feedback and suggestion are always welcome.
This weekend Howsthe.com got even better, we added many new features and would like to take this time to share them with you.
First and for most we now have four plans for you to choose from; Premium, Standard, Basic, and Free. The main differentiating factors in the plans is how many monitors and the interval rates. For more details on each of these plans visit this page (No sense in repeating that here).
Reports are another feature included in this release. It is now available to all users that are using one of the following plans; Premium, Standard, and Basic. There are three different reports which are explained below.
Average Load Time Report:
This report show the average load time of the website being monitored on a per day basis.
Uptime Report:
This report show the percentage uptime of the website being monitored on a per day basis.
Error Report:
This report show the number of errors that occurred on the website being monitored on a per day basis.
All the reports show more detailed information on hovering on the day points. We have many more ideas and suggestions on how to help you visualize this data, and we plan on adding more dynamic drill-downs on a day by day basis. Stay tuned for more details.
Has your friend ever asked you "does this site load for you"? Well now Howsthe.com Quick check feature will allow you to send a link to your friend so they can see the result of the check for them self.
We really hope you guys enjoy this releases and stay tuned for all the new features that are in the works. And like always contact us if you have any questions or suggestions.
Here at Howsthe.com it's very important for us to support as many different languages as possible. So we have upgraded our keyword search tool to support searching the content of any website, in any language. If you monitor a website that is in another language (Chinese, French, Ukrainian, etc...) now you may enter the word or phrase in that language. The keyword search tool does not separate the phrase on commas, instead the tool will search the entire content of the website while trying to located the entire string.
We really hope you enjoy this new feature, and like always please let us know what you think.
Welcome to the new blog for Howsthe.com. We plan to use this to discuss many different areas of interest to our company. On the technical side of things, these topics will include Python, Django, JQuery and other technologies that we use. Others topics like SAAS (software as a service), Internet marketing, and some basic SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ) will also be discussed. We will also post updates to this blog about new features that are released, and features that we are working on.
We really hope you will enjoy this as much as we will. Like always we love hearing from our customers, so feel free to leave us feedback in the comments, on uservoice, by emailing us at support@howsthe.com ( or fill out the contact us form ), by giving us a call or text messaging us at 1-740-MON-ITOR ( 666-4867 )
If you would like to follow this blog please subscribe to our RSS feed.
