On giving day or an application deadline, you want the donation and application pages to work, and you want the alert to reach the person who can fix it when one doesn't. OctoPing checks those pages at the interval you choose, names the cause when one fails, and gives your stakeholders a status page so they can check on the sites themselves.
The days that matter
Giving day, an admissions deadline and the opening of event registration each send people to one page at one time. On Giving Tuesday 2018, Walden Family Services, a San Diego charity, sent its appeal to donors and learned of glitches in its online giving an hour later. According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, visitors to its donation page saw only a donor-advised-fund widget and instructions to give by check, the charity couldn't take online gifts for roughly three hours, and its officials estimate it lost more than $5,000 in gifts that day. The Chronicle ties the problem to Blackbaud's Online Express donation platform.
That page still loaded with its giving form missing. A page that loads returns a normal response, so an uptime check wouldn't have flagged it, and OctoPing doesn't submit a gift to test a form. Put a test gift and your payment platform's status page on your giving-day list for that case. OctoPing covers the failures where the page itself times out, returns an error or fails its TLS handshake, and the alert names which one.
Uptime on deadline days
Add the donation, application and registration pages as sites. OctoPing's main checker requests each URL at the interval you choose, from 30 seconds to 1 hour. The fastest check is 1 minute on Starter, and 30 seconds on Agency for up to 15 sites and on Scale for up to 50. In the week before a deadline you can move the key pages to a faster interval in one bulk action, for up to 100 sites at a time and within that 30-second allowance. See uptime monitoring and the failure reasons page.
SSL on the pages people use
In our experience, donation, application and registration pages often live on their own hostnames, such as give.example.org or apply.example.edu. Every new site has SSL monitoring on and reads the certificate on each hostname you add, with a warning 30 days before expiry by default. See SSL certificate monitoring.
On September 30, 2021, the University of California, Santa Barbara's Student Affairs status page listed seven websites as unavailable, Admissions among them, and linked the problem to SSL certificates. Its first post went up at 8:15 a.m. PDT and its resolved post at 9:24, 69 minutes later. The incident page doesn't say what was wrong with the certificates. A certificate that fails to verify makes the uptime check fail with a TLS error, and the alert names it. A certificate that's heading for expiry gets a warning ahead of time.
Campaign and event domains
In our experience, campaign and event domains are often registered for one season by whoever ran the project, and the renewal reminder goes to that person. Domain monitoring is on for every new site and doesn't need the registrar login. See domain expiry monitoring and the guide to client domain expiry alerts.
Status pages and contacts for stakeholders
A status page lets a board member, a dean's office or a department head check on the sites without writing to you. Publish it for the sites they ask about. Each site on it shows 90 days of history, your incident updates appear as an incident moves to resolved, and planned maintenance shows up to 7 days ahead. On a paid plan the page can use your own hostname, such as status.example.org. See status pages.
A department head or board member who wants to hear about problems as they happen can be a contact on the page. A Member or above adds the address and confirms that the person agreed to receive the mail. Contacts get the alerts for every site and heartbeat on the page and a monthly summary of its sites, with no login and no seat, and they share one allowance with subscribers:
| Plan | Subscribers and contacts |
|---|---|
| Starter | 500 |
| Agency | 5,000 |
| Scale | 25,000 |
The page you add a contact to sets which sites they hear about, so make a separate page for a group that should hear about only some sites. See status page contacts.
Maintenance windows
When you upgrade the CMS or switch registration systems, schedule a maintenance window so the planned downtime stays out of your uptime and the down alerts stay quiet. The window's name appears on a status page, so write it for your visitors. See maintenance windows.
Scheduled jobs
A heartbeat watches the jobs behind your pages, such as a nightly gift export to your CRM or an application sync to your student system. See cron job monitoring and the guide to monitoring cron jobs with heartbeats.
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 pages that matter on your biggest days and the jobs behind them to pick a plan. Every plan includes all the checks, unlimited status pages and maintenance windows. 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 your donation page to see it working.
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Related
- FeatureWebsite uptime monitoring with the cause in every alertCheck client sites as often as every 30 seconds, see why a check failed, and flag slow responses as degraded. Planned work stays out of your uptime numbers.
- FeatureSSL certificate expiry monitoring with early alertsGet an alert before a client's SSL certificate expires, with the days left and the issuer. On by default for every site, with a warning window you set per site.
- FeatureWhite-label status pages with custom domains and subscribersPublish a status page in your client's branding, with incidents, scheduled maintenance, email subscribers, feeds and client contacts. Custom domains on paid plans.
- FeatureCron job monitoring with heartbeat URLs and missed-run alertsGet an alert when a backup, report or scheduled script stops checking in. Add one curl to the job and OctoPing tells you when it goes quiet.
- DocsContactsAdd your clients to a status page so they get every alert for its sites and a monthly summary: consent, what is sent, when and how a contact leaves.