When a brand has many location sites, you want one view that shows which site went down, which domain is about to lapse and which site moved host or changed its DNS. OctoPing puts every location site in one workspace, where you group them by region, franchisee or vendor and give each region a status page. The region's contacts get a monthly summary of its sites.
How location sites go wrong
In our experience, location sites rarely have one owner. A franchisee's web vendor lets a domain lapse because the card on file expired. A local agency moves a site to a new host without telling head office. A developer ships the staging robots.txt to production. A certificate lapses on a domain that nobody at the brand registered.
Location domains, location pages and groups
Brands build location sites in different ways. Some give each location its own domain, some use a page for each location under the brand's domain, such as /locations/boston, and some do both. OctoPing counts a site as one URL, so a location's own domain is one site, and so is each location page you want checked by itself. The www and bare versions of a domain count separately. For location pages under one domain, add the store locator and the local landing pages that campaigns point at.
One price covers a site's whole set of checks, and the plans differ by how many sites, seats and contacts they hold:
| Plan | Sites | Seats | Subscribers and contacts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 20 | 2 | 500 |
| Agency | 60 | 8 | 5,000 |
| Scale | 200 | Unlimited | 25,000 |
Scale, the largest plan, holds 200 sites, so a brand with more location URLs than that starts with the pages that matter most.
Create a group for each region, franchisee or web vendor and move the sites into it from the Websites page. If a different vendor builds each region's sites, name the group after the vendor, and filtering the list by that group shows the vendor's sites together. Bulk actions move, enable, disable or change the check interval of up to 100 sites at once, so pausing the sites of a closed location is one action, and an Admin can delete in bulk. See workspaces and team.
Roles apply to the whole workspace, so anyone you give a login sees every location, the other franchisees' sites included. Viewers are free and unlimited and fit the brand's own marketing and support people. A franchisee gets their own status page with only their sites, and email alerts as a contact on it. If an agency manages your location sites, see website monitoring for agencies.
Domains and certificates with many owners
Domain monitoring is on for every new site and works from the public registration record, so a franchisee's domain is covered without the registrar login. Besides the expiry warning, 30 days ahead by default, a separate alert says when the registrar, the registrant, the name servers or the status flags differ from the last lookup, so a transfer to a new registrar shows up. Some registries leave out the expiry date, and OctoPing can only warn about what the registry publishes.
SSL monitoring is on for every new site too and reads the certificate that each location's hostname presents, so a certificate that one franchisee's vendor bought is checked like any other. It warns 30 days before expiry by default. See domain expiry monitoring, SSL certificate monitoring and the guide to client domain expiry alerts.
DNS, hosting and robots.txt changes
A site that moved to a new host or sent its mail to a new provider still answers, so the uptime check stays green. Three checks cover those changes. They start switched off, and you turn each on per site (DNS has one switch for nameservers and one for mail records):
- DNS. Watches the nameserver and mail (MX) records of the domain and shows the old and new records side by side. See DNS change monitoring.
- Hosting. Alerts when the network behind the site changes or a CDN appears or disappears, and names the old and the new network. See hosting change detection.
- robots.txt. Stores the file on each fetch, shows a line diff when it changes and flags the site as blocked when it finds Disallow: / under User-agent: *. See robots.txt monitoring.
If a location's origin server moves and its CDN stays in front, the hosting check sees nothing, because the address that visitors reach doesn't change.
Uptime with the cause in the alert
OctoPing's main checker requests each location site at the interval you choose, from 30 seconds to 1 hour, and your plan sets the fastest one. The US, Europe and Asia check uptime too, and a down alert says which locations can still reach the site, so you can tell a dead server from a regional network problem before you call the franchisee. See uptime monitoring.
A status page for each region
Create a page for each region, add that region's sites to it and publish. Status pages are unlimited on every plan, so each region, franchisee or campaign can have one. A page shows 90 days of history per site, the incidents you post and maintenance running or starting within 7 days, and on a paid plan it can use its own hostname, such as status.brand.com. See status pages.
Contacts for regional managers
Add a regional manager's address as a contact on their region's page and confirm that they agreed to receive the mail. They get the alerts for every site and heartbeat on that page and a monthly summary of its sites, with no login and no seat. The page you add them to sets which sites they hear about, so a manager who covers two regions goes on both pages. Contacts count against the same allowance as status page subscribers, in the table above. See status page contacts and the guide to adding a client as a contact.
Who builds OctoPing
OctoPing is built by Axiolo, which uses it to watch its clients' marketing websites and landing pages. The checks, the client status pages and the monthly summaries are the ones Axiolo relies on for that work.
How it fits the price
Count the location URLs you want checked to pick a plan, then add seats for your own team and contacts for your regional managers. Every plan includes all the checks, unlimited status pages and groups. Plans start at $19 a month for 20 sites. See pricing for the full list.
Every account starts with a 14-day free trial. No card required. Start your 14-day trial and add a location site to see it working.
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Related
- FeatureDomain expiry monitoring and alerts for every client siteGet an alert before a client's domain expires, and when its registrar, name servers or lock flags change. On by default for every site you add.
- FeatureHosting change detection for every site you manageGet an alert when a site moves to a different hosting provider or CDN, with the old and new network named. Address changes inside one network stay quiet.
- Featurerobots.txt and noindex monitoring with alerts for accidental blocksGet an alert when a site's robots.txt changes or its page picks up a noindex tag, with a line diff and a warning when search engines go from allowed to blocked.
- GuideAdd a client as a status page contactSend a client every alert for their sites and a monthly summary by email, without giving them a login or using a seat.
- DocsWorkspaces and teamHow a workspace is organized, what each role can do, how invitations and seats work, and how to group and change many sites at once.