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How to Monitor Server Uptime

By Jason Lansing on Dec 10, 2009 in Web Hosting Articles

monitoring_uptime Once you have found the right hosting company, the next thing you will need to do is sign up with the service and get your account set up. You will need to get your website’s name servers pointed to your hosting account, familiarize yourself with the control panel, set up email accounts, permissions, ftp accounts and upload your files.

Once people have these basic things set up they tend to forget about a small but quite important detail. If you have a business website or are serious about a personal website, you need to keep an eye over your hosting company at all times. Verifying that your website is online on a daily basis is not enough. To be sure that the website is up a majority of time, server uptime needs to seriously be monitored. If you carefully monitor this, you will be alerted when your website goes down. You will be able to contact your host immediately when the downtime occurs, which can potentially decrease the amount of time that your website is down. It will also allow you claim compensation from the hosting company if they fail to meet their guaranteed uptime.

Hosted Monitoring is the simplest form of uptime monitoring. A third party service does the monitoring for you and lets you know whether you website is up and running online or not. There are certain advantages that hosted monitoring has over monitoring that is in-house. In order to understand what those advantages are you first need to understand how the monitoring is conducted.

To verify that your website is online, the only thing you need to do is visit the website. When you see the page appear that tells you your website is online. When you use a monitoring service, a computer program running on one of the service’s computers visits a page of your website periodically.

This sounds like a simple process, but it can easily get complicated. About 99% of the time when you are visiting a website you access it through the use of HTTP, a communication protocol.

In order to be able to communicate using HTTP, a program needs to be properly functioning on your hosting company’s machine where your website is. Visiting your website verifies the machine is on as well as that the HTTP or web server is up and running.

There are many software servers that need to run at the same time on the machine. Emails get transmitted through the use of special protocols such as IMAP, SMTP, POP and for file transfer the special protocol is FTP. There are other protocols that transmit files, however FTP is specialized.

Other services need to be tested as well like PHP. If you have a website that is based in PHP you will need a way of determining whether or not PHP running, If it isn’t your website pages won’t appear correctly to your site visitors.

Server uptime is actually a very complex thing. There is uptime for HTTP, POP/IMAP and FTP. Uptime could be redefined as the total of minutes when all of the services that the host promises are all available, not just when a website is available to be visited.

In order to really monitor uptime and truly be able to say that a website is up and running, more tests need to be conducted.

There are different monitoring companies that offer different kinds of services. A majority of these services let you choose which of these uptimes you wanted monitored such as HTTP, email, ftp, etc.

One very important feature of uptime monitoring is how frequent the tests are run. More frequent monitoring is a lot more exact, however it will also be more expensive.

If you have a small budget or your website is not of a mission critical nature, you could even choose a free monitoring service. It’s better than having nothing. If you do have a mission critical website you will want a service that checks your uptime on a frequent basis, such as every ten minutes.

One of the main advantages of hosted monitoring is that these services monitor uptime by using more than just one server and the servers are in different locations all over the world using different networks. When checking uptime using one computer from one Internet connection, your particular network could be down or maybe your website can’t be reached due to your ISP. If you decide to use a monitoring service be sure it uses multiple servers that are in different locations.

An additional important feature that a monitoring company can provide is multiple contact methods for notifying you in the event your website goes down. You may wished to be notified via phone, email, SMS, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, MSN, or pager.

Finding the right monitoring service for you can be just as difficult as finding the right hosting service. Alertra is one hosted monitoring service that has received a lot of positive reviews. They offer a free trial. A majority of monitoring services do offer free trials. There are also some that offer free basic services. These usually only check HTTP.

A few basic free services include siteuptime.com (HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP) and websitepulse.com (HTTP). Websitepulse also offers a free two week trial for services that have a value as much as $75. Host-tracker.com, montastic.com, serviceuptime.com, logicreach.com, uppanel.com, basicstate.com and unialert.com are all quite good. These all allow you to monitor your site quite frequently, especially when you consider that they are free. If you do use free service, for the best results use several simultaneously. The quality of these services can fluctuate, but taken together should alert you of any downtimes that are significant. Pingdom.com is a paid service that is very accurate.

Be sure that the email address you use for sending downtime notices is reliable and not hosted on your website’s server.

You can also use paid or free software to do your own uptime monitoring in house. Zabbix.sourceforge.net is free, open source software that you can try. Other software includes Netstatus Monitor 2.0, Nagios.org, Rushland.net, and Advanced HostMonitor.

Whatever you decide to do, be sure that you monitor the uptime for your website. It’s important to know that your website is online and also to verify that your hosting company is providing good service. If you can’t afford to pay for a monitoring service use a free one. You really can’t just rely on manual monitoring that you do on your own.