After more than a year in Beta, it is our pleasure to announce that eXternalTest has advanced to the point where we can announce the commercial release.

The start date to this new phase for XT will be September the 1st, 2006. You can keep using your account completely free of charge until then.

For Bloggers and .org sites the XT service will continue being for free, as long as this is previously requested and that a small ‘Monitored by XT’
logo appears in the footer of the page.

You can review the table fee here.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any doubts or questions.

A few days ago, we released the new HTTP Performance test, more exhaustive than the simple HTTP test. This new test performs one request for each element of the web page (related-requests, as CSS, JS, images, banners, etc), saving data about sizes and download timings. You can see the data in a very easy to understand chart:

You can create a new Performance test from the Tests tab, chosing ‘HTTP Performance’ as Test type.

Since May 30th, you can use eXternalTest to monitor streaming contents offered over RTSP. The Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), developed by the IETF and published in 1998 as RFC 2326, is a protocol for use in streaming media systems which allows a client to remotely control a streaming media server, issuing VCR-like commands such as “play” and “pause”, and allowing time-based access to files on a server.

Some RTSP servers use RTP as the transport protocol for the actual audio/video data. Many RTSP servers use RealNetworks’s proprietary RDT as the transport protocol.

You can now create a new RTSP test in the ‘Tests’ label of your XT account.

Three months ago, we released the first version of the XT Widget. It has been very welcomed (more than 6.000 downloads) and we have received lots of suggestions to improve it.

We have just released version 2.0 of the eXternalTest Widget; you can have all your online services constantly monitored from your desktop, as before, with some improvements: compact display with a scroll bar for those of you with a lot of tests, filters for test status, alerts on screen with sound (fully customizable), more information (date and time of last test, download times…)…

We remind you that to use this widget you have to install Yahoo Widgets Engine, you can find it here.

The first time you try the widget, it will ask you for a key that you can get from the ‘Config’->’Widget’ tab in your XT account.

Don’t forget to send us your suggestions, we will try to improve the product following your needs.

We have noticed that people are signing up from different countries in Europe, so we’ve decided to translate eXternal Test to more languages.

From now on, you’ll be able to see XT in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian and Swedish. We’ll soon have translations in Chinese and Arab.

We will also release in a few days version 2.0 of the XT Widget, which will be multilanguage and have some excitng new features (thanks for the ideas you’ve been sending).

If you have any suggestions about new languages you’d like to have in eXternalTest, let us know !

Yahoo Widgets (also known as Konfabulator) is a desktop enhancement tool for Mac and Windows users. I’m sure that many of you already use it.

We have just released version 1.1 of the eXternalTest Widget. Now you can have all your online services constantly monitored from your desktop: you’ll have complete and updated information about the status of your servers withot having to login in XT.

You have to install Yahoo Widgets Engine in order to use it, you can find it here.

The first time you try it, it will ask you for a key that you can get from the tab ‘Config’->’Widget’ in your XT account.

We hope you find this widget useful. If you think about new ideas in order to improve it, please don’t hesitate to send them to us.

Update: eXternalTest Widget has been published in Yahoo Widgets Gallery! You can have a look here.

We have successfuly completed the first beta phase, which was only by invitation. After that phase, we think we are ready to offer our service to a much larger number of users and we have just opened our signup form for all the people who are interested in trying eXternalTest.

Our product will remain as beta until we see that it works perfectly with a large number of users, but we can assure you that all the tests we have done up to now have been very positive.

Sign up here

Today we are announcing the release of the first beta accounts of eXternalTest.

After a long time of testing and improvements in the source code, today we are starting to give access to our first beta users. If you have already signed up as a beta user, you will soon receive an invitation to login by email. If you have not signed up for a beta account yet, do it now!

The beta phase of eXternalTest will use 8 test agents distributed around the world but concentrated in Spain as the main testing point. The agents will test your site from several ISPs, which will allow you to know how your site is seen by users connected through different service providers. Gradually, we will add new test agents around the world, in order to give you more realistic information about the real per formance of your site to users in different locations.

Have you ever been warned by one of your users that your web server is down? Is your database server down and your page showing errors? eXternalTest monitors any server connected to the Internet and warns you whenever there is a problem, so that you are the first to know when something is wrong with your server.

After several months of hard work, we are finally launching the eXternalTest website today. We are still doing the last internal test to make sure the system works fine, but we have launched the website to inform you about eXternalTest’s features (check the tour if you want a quick glimpse) and to allow users to sign up for the beta version.

We expect to have everything setup in a couple of weeks, when we will start offering our beta service to all the users who have signed up for it.