Site24x7 web content monitoring review

In times like these, digital presence is key to any business’s success. The thought of being unnecessarily offline is daunting, as that would mean reducing your business’s visibility and potential revenue. However, running a website involves various complex components, meanings things can go haywire at times. As per an ITIC study, 98% of organizations say that even an hour of downtime can cost them up to $100,000.

This is where website change monitoring software like Site24x7 come in handy. It's a robust solution that tracks your website components and reports to you if there are any unexpected downtimes. In addition to testing various website components, you can also harness real user website interaction data to identify pain points and customer trends.

Read on as we’ll explore Site24x7 in more detail in this article, discussing its best features, pricing, interface, and more.

• Interested in Site24x7? Check out the website here

Site24x7: Plans and pricing

Site24x7 offers four plans designed for various business sizes. Startups and small businesses can opt for its Web Uptime plan at $9/month. Such a low starting price makes Site24x7 one of the cheapest options in the industry. This plan comes with 25 basic monitors with a check frequency of 1 minute.

A headline feature is that right from the first plan you can choose up to 8 locations to monitor your website – from a selection of 130+ locations worldwide. There are also 3 basic status pages and decent customer support (email and forum).

If this isn’t enough, you can switch to the Pro plan made for SMBs. That's priced at $35/month and comes with 40 basic monitors, 3 synthetic transaction monitors, 5 network monitoring interfaces, and 2 netflow analyzer interfaces.

This is also Site24x7’s first plan that offers Real User Monitoring (RUM) with 500K pageviews and 5 sites. You also get a lot of third-party integrations that allow you to build custom workflows. Chat and phone support is also available from this plan onwards.

All in all, this looks like an ideal plan for most businesses thanks to its excellent value for money. After all, it has all the features Site24x7 has to offer. However, a larger business may need to switch to the Classic plan at $89/month. This one comes with 100 basic monitors and 5 transaction checks, as well as with 1M RUM pageviews.

A good thing about Site24x7 is that you can buy a lot of add-ons, meaning you won’t have to switch to a higher plan just for more threshold limits.

For example, if you’re satisfied with the Pro plan but only need additional monitors, you can simply buy 50 add-on monitors for $18/month instead of switching to the Classic plan. Similar add-ons are available for RUM data points, advanced monitors, and so on.

Additionally, Site24x7 also offers a completely free plan with 5 basic monitors and 3 location checks. However, this plan is very limited and can only be used to test the platform’s interface and efficiency before purchasing a paid plan.

Site24x7: Features

Site24x7’s comprehensive uptime monitoring checks allow you to track the load times of your web pages from as many as 8 locations at the same time. Moreover, you can choose from over 130 global locations to run these tests from.

Unlike a majority of website monitoring tools, Site24x7 comes with defacement monitoring. Defacement refers to unauthorized hacks on your website, which can lead to outages and damaged reputations.

The platform uses a baseline document object model (DOM) mechanism during a standard check for website components like images, scripts, anchors, links, text, etc. Current DOMs are continuously matched against previous ones to identify any unauthorized changes.

Besides this, Site24x7 also runs SSL/TLS certificate expiration checks and sends you notifications well before they expire.

We found the platform’s Real User Monitoring (RUM) functions to be quite comprehensive, too. It uses real data endpoints to identify load times of various components, like CSS, scripts, and images, from different domains (first-party, third-party, and CDN networks) and summarizes the impact of each component on overall response times.

Administrators can use core web vitals and secondary metrics, as well as detailed session replays to gain more insights into how real users interact with the webpages. Site24x7’s RUM also helps identify any JavaScript code errors with details on the type of error, error message, and the exact URL, which helps in quick resolution.

Once you’ve identified key website components, you can subject them to synthetic tests with Site24x7. You can record key business transactions like web checkouts, payment pages, or button clicks with the platform’s simple web recorder and then check them with synthetic traffic.

You can also use JSONPath or XPath assertions to monitor API integrations on your website to check if they’re operational or not. For example, you can set up an API check to monitor the payment page on your e-commerce website.

Beyond digital experience monitoring, Site24x7 also offers functions like network monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and application performance monitoring, each of which will cost you extra.

Site24x7 also has the largest collection of free tools we’ve seen. You get 100+ tools you can use without having to pay a single cent to blacklist checks, monitor SSL certificates, conduct DNS analysis, and monitor aspects like website uptime. The assortment of tools also include an SLA uptime calculator and a host of converter and formatter tools.

Site24x7: Interface and in use

Site24x7’s interface is pretty clean and information loaded. You’ll see a quick summary of all your website checks at the top which are color-coded for easy identification. The platform also allows you to build custom dashboards to view key metrics from every tier of your infrastructure.

There are several pre-built reports on availability, performance, SLAs, global benchmarks, and more. You can even customize and schedule reports as per your needs. Site24x7 integrates with a lot of incident management platforms, which helps you quickly communicate outages and resolve them in almost no time at all.

There are also handy mobile apps for iOS and Android, meaning you can keep an eye on your websites on the go and ensure you do not miss any critical updates. These apps are also easy to use and set up, just like the web version of the platform.

Overall, Site24x7 is beginner-friendly and you can get a hang of it in less than a day, making it a good choice even for non-tech-savvy teams.

Site24x7: Support

Site24x7 offers comprehensive support with dedicated emails for support and sales inquiries. Depending on the plan you’re on, you get access to either basic or premium support. Basic support included email and forum access, whereas premium comes with phone and chat support on top of the previous two.

Apart from this, you get access to Site24x7’s rich collection of help documents, knowledge base, how-to’s, and training videos, so you don't have to worry about any common queries. There’s also a very active community space where you can post your questions and get them answered by fellow Site24x7 users.

Site24x7: The competition

Although Site24x7 is undoubtedly a great monitoring solution for every business need, it doesn't hurt to look at the alternatives.

Uptime.com is an enterprise-level monitoring tool ideal for large businesses. In addition to synthetic and RUM tests, you can even run group and cloud status checks. It also offers more than 20 types of basic monitors, which is more than what you get with Site24x7.

Plus, you can run checks from as many as 15 global locations simultaneously and harness 1.5M+ RUM data points for insightful user data. It also supports private location checks and internal status pages for seamless intra-team communications. The only downside is that it can be a bit expensive.

For a more affordable option, try Datadog. It offers feature-specific plans ideal for small businesses with limited needs. For instance, its RUM plan with session replays costs just $1.80/month for 1,000 sessions.

Datadog also offers a very handy Mobile Testing feature that lets you assess your app's stability, identify app crashes, and assist in resolving any glitches. Plus, it has the largest collection of third-party integrations we’ve seen, supporting 800+ applications for seamless workflows and notifications.

Site24x7: Final verdict

Site24x7 is a complete website monitoring solution that allows you to monitor various components of your website, such as APIs, load speeds, and overall uptime. Plus, the platform’s baseline document object model (DOM) mechanism detects any unauthorized changes or hacks before it gets out of hand.

We also liked its dashboards, which are fully customizable and laced with various graphs and charts. Site24x7 is also one of the few monitoring platforms that offer a plethora of free tools, allowing you to monitor websites, networks, and servers.

Paying users will find Site24x7 quite affordable, as plans start from just $9/month. Moreover, you can purchase a lot of add-ons to increase monitoring limits. To top it all off, you get a 30-day free trial, too.

• We've also featured the best webpage change monitoring software

FAQs