By Paul Lang, Editor, Sell It!
September 22nd, 1999

See Also   The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet   Alternative Payment Solutions   Fraud Prevention Tools   Top Tools to Help You Boost Customer Service   iV-Caller Verification Service   Make Your Price Sell!   FindWhat.com   Make Your Knowledge Sell!   HumanClick   Netship   iFulfill.com   Nexchange   Nothing But 'Net   Netwhistle.com   Bigstep.com   Make Your Site Sell!   AWeber   GoTo.com   Constant Contact   WebAdverts   PersonalStore   SiteInspector   LinkExchange   ClickTrade   Safe   eCHARGE   MilliCent

Product	Netwhistle.com
Description	Availability / performance monitoring service for servers and routers
Available	Now
Pricing	PersonalWhistle: Free BusinessWhistle: $9.95/month

Whilst selling on the Web has many advantages over traditional brick and mortar retail, it has its disadvantages too. For example, in a "real" store the owner is able to study shoppers' behaviour and to communicate with them to understand why they did - or did not - make a purchase.

The closest to this a merchant can come in a virtual store is to make a careful study of their server logs. Now whilst this will undoubtedly yield useful information about Web shoppers' behaviour, it is limited in that it can only tell you about shoppers who successfully entered your store. It can tell you nothing about shoppers who tried to enter your Web store but were unable to do so because your Web server was either unavailable or overloaded.

Now I'm sure that if you were to take a straw poll of Web merchants and ask them to name the greatest benefits of selling online, very near the top of the list would be the ability to sell 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. However, very few merchants have access to reliable data about their Web store's availability. And as long as their server is available every time they try to access it, they naturally tend to make the assumption that it is always available.

However, two new services from Netwhistle.com are designed to eliminate this guesswork by providing performance and availability data for servers and routers.

The basic service (called PersonalWhistle) only checks for Web site availability, and is provided free of charge (i.e. advertising supported). Set up is straightforward: you simply enter the URL that you want Netwhistle.com to monitor together with one or more email addresses that are to be notified if the Web site is found to be unavailable. The service defaults to an hourly monitoring period and email notification. However, the service can also be configured to monitor availability every six hours and to send a pager message if a problem is found.

The more advanced service (BusinessWhistle) monitors site availability, download speed and content and costs $9.95 per device per month.

BusinessWhistle's availability monitoring check is the same as Personal Whistle's with the exception that the monitoring period can be specified to be as little as every five minutes.

For the slow response notification service, merchants specify a maximum download time for the Web page they have chosen to be monitored. A time of between 5 and 30 seconds can be set. This could cause problems for those merchants whose stores include complex pages that normally take longer than 30 seconds to load as Netwhistle.com will obviously continually detect and report an error condition.

The final BusinessWhistle service, content verification, simply checks that a page provided by a Web server contains a pre-defined text phrase.

For those with more complex monitoring needs, Netwhistle.com can be configured to check the availability of other Internet devices such as routers and DNS or mail servers.

As well as email and pager notification, Netwhistle.com also provide a Network Status Console (see screenshot below). This summarises the status of all monitored devices and allows for new devices to be added.

Verdict: If you're serious about selling on the Web you need to ensure your customers can always access your Web store. Netwhistle.com allows you to automatically monitor this at a very reasonable cost.