One of our favorite SaaS (Software as a Service) providers is Wormly.com. They provide external, multi-country testing of website URL’s for real content. Why is this important? Why is Wormly so highly recommended?

• Testing from inside your own network may make your website “appear” to be online even if its not accessible to the rest of the World.
• Network Uptime is not Website Uptime. Use wormly to check for keywords and content… or also check for words like “ERROR” and “WARNING” to know when your website is down.
• Testing from multiple locations (states and countries) tests to make sure DNS is properly setup WorldWide.
• Wormly is simple, easy to setup, easy to use, and the website interface is fast and friendly. Many monitoring tools bog you down by trying to include dozens of features you may never use.

So how do you monitor a website URL that’s hosted on multiple servers?

Its a very common practice for websites with a lot of traffic to split there website content and serve it from multiple servers to make sure traffic and website load times don’t bottleneck. Wormly is one of the few monitoring tools that allows you to monitor the status of your website on all live servers independently! Yes, that means you will be notified even if its just 1 of the servers that crashing/failing/experiencing issues.

ANSWER: Using Wormlys “Custom Request Headers” we can easily setup the monitor to request information by IP address while passing the “requested host URL” so that the server properly loads the website you intend to monitor.

Here is an example that shows 3 URL’s being monitored. Note the first url is the natural URL and it tests to make sure the “load balancer” is working correctly. The second and third URL’s are the IP addresses of the live servers (partially hidden to respect the privacy of the domain owners).

Next lets take a look at how we setup the URL monitor to properly load the website when testing against the servers IP address from the second monitor.