Website monitoring is the process of testing or tracking (monitoring) how end-users interact with a website or web application (Wikipedia). Why is website monitoring so important for any business, any company having a web site? The main idea is: you find out that your website/web server experiences troubles of any kind, earlier than your customers.

Why is it necessary for a web hosting company to monitor its servers? Obviously, the same reason: you are notified of server downtime by a webiste monitoring service, and not by your customers. Some really good web monitoring services will not only tell you when your server is down, but also help diagnose the bottlenecks of your system. Another reason for monitoring your servers -- you'll be able to prove that "99.999% uptime" is more than just a statement.

There is one more good reason - some website monitoring companies offer affiliate programs. You can include website monitoring in your services list and you will get a certain fee for every paying customer. Dotcom-Monitor has recently added affiliate program and now pays 25% for each customer who becomes a paid client. You can get more details on the affiliate program here and sign up here.

McAfee tried to reveal the most dangerous domain zones in its annual report “Mapping the Mal Web”. It seems that some domain zones provide to domain owners more opportunities for violation of security rules then other ones. According to McAfee the most dangerous zones are “.hk” (Hong Kong) – 19.2 % of websites, “.cn” (China) – 11.8% and “.info” – 11.7%. Only 5% of websites of “.com” domain zone are dangerous. Some domain name registrars reduce requirements and deflate to attract more customers. Due to this fact a lot of spammers and developers of harmful codes have opportunity to register domain name. Unfortunately domain name registrars which are responsible for this fact are not mentioned in McAfee report. Another dangerous domain zones are “.ro” (Romania) – 6.8% of websites and “.ru” (Russia) - 6%. The Author of this report is Shane Keats who said that “Mapping the Mal Web” was based on analysis of more than 9.9 million websites. According to McAfee the most secure domain zones are “.gov” – 0.05%, “.jp” (Japan) – 0.1%, “.au” (Australia) – 0.3%.

Functional website testing process emulates user activity, it loads different pages, uses links, fills up and sends forms, gets email, sends files, tries to hack your website. For example there is registration form. We have to check all possible values for all form fields thus we have to try 2-3 variants.

Email (Is it filled?, Does it correspond with pattern?, Is it unique?)

Password (Is it filled?, Does it contain “bad” symbols?)

Login (Is it filled?, Does it contain “bad” symbols?, Is it unique?)

Then we have to check that we got a correct system message. Functional testing is usually carried out by special people and requires a lot of time. There is a way to make this process easier.There are two kinds of functional testing: Browser emulators: httpUnit, JWebUnit, WebTester, SimpleTest Programs which use browser’s API: Watir, Selenium.

Yahoo starts test of common identification system OpenID 2.0, which will give an opportunity to use one bunch of login-password for access to different web services. OpenID platform represents open decentralized system of common login. Its protocol was developed by Brad Fitzpatrick who developed online dairy service Live Journal.

Yahoo will represent OpenID provider. In other words after you register on Yahoo website you can use website which are the part of OpenID community without any logins and passwords. As is known OpenID is supported by more then 10000 websites. Test was started in January.

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