While there are many levels of sophistication when it comes to developing websites, most web developers are familiar with the use of production sites and stagingsites. Production sites are the public-facing versions of your website that are used every day by site visitors. Staging sites are private clones of your production sites. They are used primarily by developers to test…

Today we are excited to announce that we have officially begun to migrate our website update and monitoring service to the watchful.net domain. Our original domain name watchful.li will be phased out. Since launching in 2012, Watchful has had a complicated relationship with its domain name watchful.li.  As we have explained to many folks at conferences and online, the idea of the .li…

Watchful will have a planned outage on May 9, 2019 in order to upgrade our database infrastructure. We expect the maintenance period to last no more than three hours. It is scheduled to begin at 11:00 UTC (6:00 AM Chicago, USA). During the maintenance period, a snapshot of all your website data and logs will be taken and…

Watchul is pleased to annunce that Francesco Abeni will be joining the development team at Watchful as interim Chief Technology Officer. Francesco is one of the original members of the Watchful development team and is well-suited to expanding the feature set and modernizing the code base. Francesco replaces Pierre-Andre Vullioud as CTO who, along with David Pizzotti,…

Like many web services, Watchful has been busy making changes to address the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) set to go into effect in the European Union on May 25, 2018. Here at Watchful, we are working towards GDPR compliance in four main areas: Obtaining consent from users to collect and store personal information Creating…

We have recently released new versions of our Joomla Client (v1.12.2), WordPress Client (v1.0.2) & the SSO Plugin for Joomla (v1.3). New Joomla & WordPress Clients The updated Joomla and WordPress clients improve the way we authenticate calls from the Watchful server so as to avoid a theoretical timing attack: http://php.net/manual/en/function.hash-hmac.php#111435). New SSO Plugin The new…

Watchful will have a planned outage on April 3, 2017 in order to complete the previously announced migration to Amazon Web Services. We expect the maintenance period to last no more than three hours. It is scheduled to begin at 7:00 UTC (2:00 AM Milwaukee, USA and 09:00 Lausanne, Switzerland). To prepare for migration, be sure…

Effective immediately, Watchful now officially supports backups, updates, monitoring, and maintenance for websites powered by WordPress. Support for WordPress has been a common request from existing Watchful users who primarily use Joomla as well as longtime WordPress users who are looking for a simpler and more affordable solution for website management than currently on the…

In the coming weeks, we plan to migrate our infrastructure from WiredTree to Amazon Web Service (AWS). The primary reasons for this change are to move to a scalable system that can be expanded as needed during high-volume events (such as the release of an important software update) and to provide a more central geographic…

As some of you have now noticed by now, the Watchful Dashboard has recently gotten the makeover we first previewed earlier this year. This is the fourth version of the Watchful Dashboard and we think you’re going to love using it. Here’s some reasons why. 1. Customizable content Undoubtedly, the most exciting change is the ability…