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.
