Who Notifies You When Your Sites Are Down?
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Late last night and early this morning I experienced the worst of my days. My landing pages, tracking, websites, blogs, apps, were all down. My whole server seemed it was attacked, found out this morning. Late last night one of my sites stopped loading, then another site, and then another site, and another. I was like who the fudger.
I submitted a ticket to my hosting and they quickly resolved it, temporarily. This morning my sites were going in and out every 30 minutes. This was good. I was up till 3am trying to figure out what was wrong with my hosting and we finally fixed the issue today at around 2pm. Close to 12 hours!
It is a good thing I have a set of tools to help me and good support form my hosting to help me resolve this issue.
I host with WiredTree, love these guys. They are pretty pricey but you are paying for superb support. I can send in a ticket about an issue and get someone to answer it within 2-5 minutes. When I call them I am usually first in line and the resolution time is within15 minutes depending on the issue.
Last night and early today was something different, they have provided me with good results and then my sites would just go back down. It was impossible to try to see where the problem was because of the constant down time. So we did something together, yes they work with you – amazing. So after we did this specific change/troubleshoot everything is still up and continues to be up.
Some tools, which I think will help with you with your site is getting instant notification of your site failing. I use 2 systems to monitor my site. One is free and the other is paid.
- Montastic -
This is a very basic site monitoring system, it just tells you if your site is currently down or not. They do send you an email when it is down and when it is up. The only thing that I do not like is that it monitors every 30 minutes or pings every 30 minutes. You can definitely upgrade to a plan which is very very cheap. But they do not go into big details or provide SMS notification, which I like. If you want something very basic and you know you are not throwing a bunch of traffic to your site, def sign up with tis service. Its free! - Pingdom -
This is a more versatile website and monitoring system. The best part is they have an iPhone App! Also they have SMS notification, email notification, graphs and stats. They have a pretty good versatile of weapons to use. I am happy to have signed up with Pingdom because of the SMS notification as well as email. It was how I found out one of my sites were down and then another and another.Their iPhone app has a great interface and is very visual with the information you want to see. Uptime, downtime, and response time. This gives you a great understanding of how your sites are doing.
Overall I would suggest using any, Pingdom does have a free signup account but only allows one site. Montastic you can have multiple sites for free, but again pings it every 30 minutes. My buddy Mark from AffiliateMarketer.info suggests to me to have a DNS redirect, which I think I may do, fairly cheap service. It is similar to twitter when it crashes and shows you the fail whale.
So how are you handling your site downtime? This is a lesson learned but I am glad I got pingdom as a service to help alert me when my sites are down. Especially the nice little iphone app they have developed is also a plus, which is free as well.
Also make sure you check these guys out at WiredTree! They are excellent and superior customer service.
Hey Ian,
I had the EXACT same thing happen to me 1-2 days ago on WiredTree as well.
I have a VPS there that went down for 12 hours. They had to completely replace the server and re-instate it from the nightly backups, so I lost 12 hours of data as well.
Although this kind of outage ‘isn’t covered by the SLA’ i complained anyway and they are going to credit me 1 free month.
It was very frustrating, the 12 hour outage cost me more a years VPS costs.
Yeah, my sites were down a few days ago on shared host. All of the sudden they decided to move me to the new server the same night they sent a message. I had no monitoring in place there, so I just lost my ppc money all night and morning. As a result I was at loss on my affiliate offers that day.
Monitoring is pretty useful, especially when you have a decent investment in advertisement.
Good at last you are able to fix your host.
WiredTree is very very very good with support. The only crappy thing is that if you develop sites for businesses and the business you are developing for wants to have private nameservers which requires 2 IP’s and you have already used your 8 IP’s WiredTree will NOT justify any more, because they say you can not justify IP’s for nameservers.
Besides that they are awesome, and the support is top notch.
But if you want to resell hosting, or develop sites that have private nameservers you can’t because they will limit your IP’s.
It’s a shame because they really are good (have I said it enough? lol)
Was your issue something to do with some scripts you had, or was this some cpanel/whm flaw ? Just wondering in case others might run into the issue, cause downtime is NEVER FUN.
See you at ASW pimp.
RtotheJ
So what caused the downtime. hardware, bad script or corrupted database?
i like dnsmadeeasy, they monitor and failover to another host in only a few seconds if your site is down
good luck, downtime is really frustrating.
@blog
there was ‘banging’ my box and changed certain files around ot have open and sleeping queries.
There’s another service through my website called downtime witness or sometimes called competition witness where you can watch any site (as many as you want) included with your website and/or video hosting. I’d be happy to send you info on it or even give you a free trial.
I have been with pingdom for over year now love their service & easy to use Iphone app great post Ian gotta monitor those websites 24/7.
WebsitePulse is a really good one too. I’ve been using them for a long time now with no complaints whatsoever.
i am using internet seer. they tell me everytime my site is down or any problem is happening in my site
Server problems like this can be a real pain in the ass to deal with. Sometimes all you can do is sit back and think of the money you are losing as someone else is trying to figure out the problem. It is a great idea to use automated tools to monitor your uptime. Without something like this, you could end up being offline for much longer as it may take hours or even days to notice.
Wired Tree’s customer support sounds excellent Ian – I bet your glad to have them as your hosting provider. They solved the problem quickly and professionally, which is what a good web host should do.
By the way, those 2 tools which you mentioned look very interesting – I’ll be sure to check them out.
It’s good that you reacted to it fast. I am sure you will come back up with all the sales as a good affiliate marketer.
Im using my friend’s web host. So when My site has crash he call me. But I wanna use internet seer
This is just like a kind of insurance for me. I wonder would this be possible to create national program of web pages insurance that would give owners a little bit of comfort that in case of losing data from server or some effects of hard work – the will get reparations. That could be great idea.
Pingdom is the way to go! There is nothing else like it out there right now. And it will keep you up dated up to the minute. But, it might be time to switch servers…why would it do this?
pingdom is still the great.
Thanks ian for this post. I never monitored my site. since i read your post. I will try to monitor my site so that i am aware if my site is down or not..
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