Show HN: GeoScreenshot – Test your website from many locations

http://www.geoscreenshot.com/locations?utm_source=hn&utm_medium=hn&utm_campaign=hn

by kpsychwave • 10 years ago

60 31 10 years ago

geoscreenshot.com

kpsychwave12• 10 years ago

Just added London, Singapore and Amsterdam to the free offering. Please post any questions/feature requests here.

blakesterz• 10 years ago

I'm guessing it's either my Privacy Badger or uBlock Origin, but the site's broken for me on Chrome 52 Ubuntu.

corobo• 10 years ago

"The site's broken" on Hacker News, really? Put some effort into reporting the problem!

brudgers• 10 years ago

Homepage: https://www.geoscreenshot.com/capture

jdsampayo• 10 years ago

Tried but always got "Encountered Problem"

andrewl• 10 years ago

I like what you're offering, but I just get an "Encountered Problem" error in the latest version of Chrome on Windows 10. And I was testing a very minimal site with just the London location, so load should have been low. Load from my one test, that is. You may be getting a lot of other traffic.

If it can be made to work reliably, I could see my company paying for it.

kpsychwave12• 10 years ago

Hi Andrew,

There was a spike about 2 hours ago and the app exceeded an hourly quota. It should good to go now.

Please contact me at contact@geoscreenshot.com with your needs, I offer custom solutions for companies.

dbg314152• 10 years ago

Cool idea.

Your marketing site's pricing page breaks on mobile.

Also seems like you could automate this and run the check every 5 minutes, and then compare the screenshots to see if any of them are different, then alert the users.

NetStrikeForce• 10 years ago

For what purpose? It should be easier/lighter to check if the HTML, CSS or JS has changed if you'd like to detect a defacement or a site load issue (actually, the HTTP status code would be different for one or more resources; 404, 500, etc)

kpsychwave12• 10 years ago

Visual consistency checking is more comprehensive than source code diffs. For example, errors in third party services (a region-blocked ad, a youtube iframe, etc...) may not show up in error logs or HARs.

zeta0134• 10 years ago

That sounds like a good idea on paper, but I think rotating or animating content (especially advertising banners) would heavily complicate that strategy.

dbg314152• 10 years ago

Fair point.

I don't deal with a lot of sites that serve ads, but I do deal with a lot of sites that are on CDNs. Was more my target user group.

kpsychwave12• 10 years ago

There are also pop ups (like the EU cookie warning), self-triggering modals, A/B testing experiences, and newer patterns like feedback widgets that give false positives.

I am working on a visual diff engine that will account for all of these, you can sign up for updates here:

http://geodiff.launchrock.com/

kpsychwave12• 10 years ago

Thanks dbg31415, I have pushed that fix. That is an excellent feature suggestion.

batrat• 10 years ago

Not working on chrome & win 10

kpsychwave12• 10 years ago

I am using it on Win 10 and Chrome, and it looks fine. Could you describe what is not working?

kpsychwave12• 10 years ago

If you got the "Encountered Problem" error, there was an unexpected spike and traffic a few hours ago, and the API was blocking requests. The server is back up now.

I would really appreciate it if you could send me any bugs, screenshots, suggestions to contact@geoscreenshot.com

cmillard2• 10 years ago

This looks similar to:

https://geopeeker.com/

I did a quick price/feature comparison and it appears to be a toss-up depending on what you need. Any thoughts on how you plan to distinguish yourself from this other service? Selecting your location is definitely a cool idea- good work!

kpsychwave12• 10 years ago

We have more locations, a simpler product and more options for the advanced plan.

GeoScreenshot has a simpler and more intuitive UI so you can go back/forth between new captures and your history without having to reload pages.

Our pricing model is also simpler, we give you more locations and options for the plus plan. The free account with all the "plus" options enabled, so you know what you are paying for.

At the time of this writing, we offer 7 free locations and > 60 plus locations. For our advanced plan, you can select from > 420 cities from nearly every country in the world. We will set up a dedicated worker in that region.

Some examples of advanced locations:

https://www.geoscreenshot.com/country/united-states https://www.geoscreenshot.com/country/saudi-arabia https://www.geoscreenshot.com/country/china

---

I would also like to add:

The main advantage of using GeoScreenshot over buying a proxy list or a VPN is convenience and efficiency. To minimize the headaches and man hours spent on website testing.

There are significant man hour costs and technical barriers with using VPNs/proxies, changing view ports, clearing cache, shifting browsers, system settings, locale settings, time zones.

cmillard2• 10 years ago

Thanks for your response- I'll definitely keep this service in mind in the future!

josh_carterPDX• 10 years ago

We use Hotjar recordings to see what people see from various regions. It's pretty useful in that we can see how the page loads for users outside of the US. But beyond that, we can see what they interact with on the page.

This seems useful from a very high level, but if someone wants more data points I'm sure they would use something more robust.

kpsychwave12• 10 years ago

As of right now, we provide uptime and visual testing. If you have advanced functionality that varies by region, something like IP spoofing might work best for your needs.

But for most companies use GeoIP targeting for things like:

Currency and Dynamic Pricing Locale (date time formats, languages), Dynamic translation functionality Determining visitor origins Custom ads/messaging Redirection to local websites (Amazon, Google, Craigslist use this) IP-based blocking (for cyber attack protection)

I would think that something like Hotjar is more useful for studying user behavior (how it varies across regions) than testing website functionality.

I will have to to more digging to see if they do the actual recordings from servers in those particular regions, or if they just map geo-filtered data over a standard video recording (with the assumption that it renders the same everywhere)

preinheimer• 10 years ago

If you need to actually navigate your website from different locations we can give you a hand: https://wonderproxy.com/ we have proxy servers in >200 locations around the world.

Our more basic screenshot tool is up at http://shotsherpa.com

bhartzer• 10 years ago

Looks like it still is encountering problems, I get a 403 error from London an ny. Might be cloudflare blocking it?

kpsychwave12• 10 years ago

Thanks for that. I caught a 403 in the logs for PriceHipster, logs confirmed that CloudFlare (nginx/cloudflare) blocked it.

If it is yours, thanks for reporting it, I have pushed the fix down the pipeline. Its not giving a 403 anymore, but still doesn't render properly.

I have tried to debug it with a different engine but it looks like the site has JS based browser detection (not based on user agent strings). Since its a headless browser, some JS functionality is unavailable, and super dynamic sites break. Another limitation I am working around.

Show HN: GeoScreenshot – Test your website from many locations

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