Our service tests your website from the customer's perspective, i.e. from outside the firewall. Even though you (or your hosting company) may have internal monitoring, this does not actually prove that a customer can get to your site, or tell you how long it takes to download. Our software actually downloads web pages including all the graphics, JavaScript etc. over the public Internet.

Our testing servers are directly connected to the Internet on very high capacity links so that we can test thousands of sites an hour. Each individual test uses the same bandwidth as would be available to an ordinary user connected via a 56k dial-up modem because most small businesses and almost all consumers still use dial-up modems. In bigger companies, although users are connected via leased lines, they have to share this bandwidth with their colleagues. For example if twelve people are sharing a 128kb connection, and three are downloading a page at the same time, each of those three people has no more than a single person connecting via a dial-up connection.

If a download fails, either because the server does not respond, or the download is not completed within your specified threshold, we repeat the test from a different server, using a different telecommunications carrier. That way we can be sure that it is not a temporary glitch, and that it is not an intermediate node (router) that has failed. In other words if both tests fail in rapid succession, we can be sure that it is the web server or router at the company supporting your website that is at fault.

If your site is interactive, testing your web server's ability to deliver a standard HTML page is not enough. You might be using PHP, ASP or particular cgi-bin scripts. You may have secure, password protected areas. It is entirely possible that the basic http service is working, but programs and scripts are not.

To test that the login process works, we actually submit the guest username and password combination you have setup. We confirm that the correct page then downloads completely as a result. We can switch cookies on or off for this type of test.

More sophisticated sites are often built using databases and web application software such as Cold Fusion and Vignette. Site Confidence traps and alerts on standard error messages produced by these applications. Customers can also write their own scripts to test for critical or near critical problems such as disk space, memory usage, excessive database table sizes or whatever else may be a problem. Using the special Site Confidence error tags, customers can be alerted before these problems affect the performance of the site.

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