Site uptime monitoring

siteuptime My PerfectTablePlan website and all the associated websites (such as http://www.weddingtableplan.com) have gone down three times this week. Sigh. The first time they went down for 5 hours, the second time for 3.5 hours and the third time for 6 hours. Perhaps they have been overdoing the festivities at my ISP, 1and1.co.uk . I am not impressed. Somebody needs a good kick up the arse.

To rub salt into the wound they even had the cheek to put up parking pages with ads in place of my sites. Some of these ads were for my own sites, which also displayed parking pages – with more ads. So 1and1 were potentially taking money off me through adwords at the same time! I have a feeling 1and1 and I may be parting company in the not too distant future.

I am now setting up a copy of my site with a different ISP. If (when?) the site goes down again I should be able to point the DNS to the backup ISP.

At least I found out about it quickly due to site monitoring service www.siteuptime.com . I use their free service, which is adequate for my needs at present. Are you monitoring your site(s)? Do you have a back-up plan?

15 thoughts on “Site uptime monitoring”

James 22 December 2007 at 10:56 am

That sort of outage is totally amateur. You need to be hosting with one of the big mainstream US hosters.

Floyd Price 22 December 2007 at 12:57 pm

Andy,

I started using SiteUpTime a few weeks ago and have to say it is excellent, I have upgraded to a paid account because i have several URLS to check.

I also have SiteUpTime sms me when one of my sites goes down and when they come back up

Check out my SiteUpTime status page : http://www.siteuptime.com/stat.php?UserId=73518

Adam Dempsey 22 December 2007 at 1:52 pm

I use Pingdom on my main site, does the job for me

Wouter Dhondt 22 December 2007 at 2:54 pm

“I am now setting up a copy of my site with a different ISP. If (when?) the site goes down again I should be able to point the DNS to the backup ISP.”

You can point your DNS to the backup right away no? You should have more than 2 nameservers available. Otherwise, it might take up to 2 days before all DNS records are updated and your domain points to the new ISP…

Mason Lyngby 22 December 2007 at 4:05 pm

Thanks for the link.

Jonathan Wax 22 December 2007 at 5:21 pm

http://www.no-ip.com can help you if you need to switch between servers quickly. This way you do not have to wait for 2-3 days for the change to propagate across the internet.

Heri 22 December 2007 at 7:17 pm

i use monastic.com which is a free service

they ping your website every so and then and send you an email if the website is down.

and it’s free too

Michael Mathy 23 December 2007 at 12:33 pm

I use http://www.internetvista.com. Currently, I do not have a backup plan but in 3 years, my site was down for 5 minutes due to the fault of my ISP.

Oliver 23 December 2007 at 8:20 pm

Andy, a few months ago there was a discussion on BoS where people recommended http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/ to have a quick automated failover. Instead of just monitoring, they also are your DNS nameservers and can redirect traffic to your backup in 2-4 minutes (so they claim). I haven’t used them yet, but I may.

The discussion is here:
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.520266.9

Andy Parkes 24 December 2007 at 11:52 am

I was with 1and1 for a while and was not happy with their support levels.

I’ve recently made the switch to http://www.csnewmedia.co.uk

They are a small UK ISP but their support is excellent as a result

if you need an introduction drop me an email

Love the blog btw

Tony Austin 28 December 2007 at 4:29 am

As well as SiteUptime, for years I’ve been using similar free services offered by InternetSeer ( http://internetseer.com/ )and Web CEO ( http://www.web-ceo-site-monitoring.com/ ). A combination pf the three of them give a nice overall view of my site and also http://notestracker.com mirror/backup site. They take snapshots at differing times, not as frequently as a paid service but good enough for my needs. (The suite offered by Web CEO also does lots of other SEO-type stuff.) I also use sitemeter.com and statcounter.com for web page hit counts. Since my website is fairly small, and run on a shoestring, I get along nicely with these free services. Over the years, I’ve tried a variety of ISPs, and find it amazing that most of them don’t inform you about any downtime, even if it is long (a couple of the sites have been down for days at a stretch). The most reliable one that I’ve com across so far is Mew York Internet, current host for http://asiapac.com.au/ (via local Australian company Quadra Hosting, http://www.quadrahosting.com.au/ who look do an excellent job looking after things for me because I’m not in the hosting business myself).