eXternalTest was nominated in the top three business plans in the IE Business Plan Competition 2008, this competition took place yesterday in Madrid at Instituto de Empresa one of the top five european business schools. There we had the opportunity to see interesting business plans in several industries.

Next 10th of July we will compete with other nine spanish projects in the IE Business Competition organised by the Instituto de Empresa, one of the most important business schools in Europe. VentureDay is one of the most important investment events in Spain.

Feel free to come, just fill in this suscription form:

http://ventureday.ie.edu/esp/

XT will be present at CeBIT in Hannover (Germany) from the 4th to 9th of March, our stand will be located in pavillion number 13 (Fixed Line & Network solutions, Wireless Technologies).

CeBIT is the most important IT and online services fair worldwide, and we don’t want to miss the opportunity for showing our services. If you are planning to be there you can arrange a meeting with us sending an email to info at externaltest.com

We have just launched an improvement in the web tool, this new feature will allow you disable automatically some tests while your site or servers are down due to maintenance tasks, this way the availability statistics will not be affected negatively by maintenance downtimes.

So, you can program the timeframe when you will be doing maintenance jobs as “Maintenance Windows” in the web tool. This can be enabled in a new tab in the test administration menu. The windows can be defined either as periodic tasks, for example done every day from 0:00 to 1:30, or as punctual interventions on a specific date.

With this feature you can control availability measurements and what is more important, you will not receive any more error alerts while maintenance is being done.

For those of you who were using HTTP Performance test, we’ve developed some new features in order to give a more realistic behaviour to the tests, more similar to common browsers like explorer or firefox.

Now you can select the number of threads that work on each test, and you can select the load profile for the web page components.

Example: Yahoo home, 5 threads for images.

We hope this new improvements will be very usefull for your tests, don’t hesitates contacting us if you need any kind of help.

Some of our beta testers have been testing XTmobile last months.

It’s a new way of being always informed about the status of our servers and online services.

Same way as our widget, you’ll be informed at any moment and any place about the precise status of your servers, last tests, connection time, DNS resolution, download time, etc.

We hope this service will be very useful for you, and we would be very pleased to hear your comments.

If you want to start using it now, just write next URL in your mobile browser:

externaltest.com/mobile

Then write your login and password to access your tests results data.

eXternalTest has been giving monitoring services since 2005. We’ve been always centered in product features, very customer oriented, hearing really closely their needs, and giving less importance to the design of our site. But last month we decided to renew it and here is the result.

Don’t hesitate to contact us for sending your feedback, we really appreciate it.

Any disconnection your server may suffer not only affects users trying to access it by the time your server is out of service, the problem spreads larger. A recently released new confirms the following: “A disconnection of the server may put you out of Google”.

In terms of Vanessa Fox, from Google, the most famous and used web search engine: “If the server is down when Googlebot tries to access your site, then, your services may disappear from the index until Googlebot is able to search them again”.

When Googlebot cannot access a web site, will try again a few times before removing that site from the index. Then, the time spent before the site may be indexed again varies depending on diverse facts.

Google doesn’t like that serps are filled with searching results leading to unavailable pages; so then, it’s normal that their major efforts are focused on removing from the index all those sites where Googlebot couldn’t access. They wouldn’t probably mind if your web site is fired from the index regardless because of the vast amount of sites with similar contents that are shown as result of any search performed on Google; and, looking this way, Google’s aim is to redirect their users to pages that are available and accessible properly. Google’s, and every single enterprise’s aim is to satisfy their users or clients and, in this way, they are looking to provide a good service.

Apart of the explained above, we strongly encourage you to learn more about the subject by reading a pair of references. The first: “Has Google regard on the response time of the server as positioning factor?”, including different user’s comments, among all of them the one posted by Brown, who affirms that “after changing my hosting service to a new server, apart from decreasing the response time, the number of visits incoming from Google raised notably”.

The other one: “Why good hosting is important”.

So, summarizing, we have to be very careful with the disconnections of our server. It is necessary to have it continuously monitored so as to fix every single error immediately.

The recently released eXternalTest’s screenshots tests improve the tests range including a “boom” among its domain tools: the screenshot of a Web site.

Its difference with other technologies is that the screenshot is performed by a real navigator instead by using emulator. At the moment, the supported navigators are:

-Internet Explorer, 5th, 6th and 7th releases.
-Mozilla Firefox
-Netscape

Working in this way, we’ll be able to locate layout errors (like banners not working properly in some navigators, text fragments that are not where they are supposed to be, CSS not working properly) as well as client’s side errors, like javascript errors.

From now and ever, two “surveillance centres” are added to eXternalTest. To the ten already existing spread from all over the world, we have added two more access points from where to perform tests to your Internet services.

The incorporations have been located in South America and Europe, concretely in Argentina and Italy.

In this way, we’ll provide fully testing service to your site. Because the performance of tests from a wider range of locations, improves our capacity to compare the access latencies of your services.