Is your website or blog down and unavailable? If you don’t monitor you won’t know whether your site is up or down. You certainly don’t want to wait for your customers to tell you. http://mon.itor.us/ offers free and paid server monitoring. They offer a valuable service which I use to monitor the HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SMTP and POP3 server services.  This covers the web server, file transfer protocol and email. If any of these services does not respond to a ping I receive an email notification alert. A key point in making this service function is to use an email address that is not on the server that you are monitoring. For example, I am monitoring the server that handles all email for jbspartners.com.  Any service interruption alerts get sent to my GMail account, instead of a jbspartners email address. I configured my phone and computer to monitor this account so that I get immediate notification. Forwarding to your standard email, jbspartners.com in my case, would fail to deliver the notification if the server is down. With these emails in hand you can contact your host and ask specifically what went wrong with the failed service at the specific date and time in the email. This can lead to specific enhancing adjustments on the server or maybe a decision to switch hosts after seeing a pattern of failures that are not getting fixed. The Problem Alert email is easy to read and full of information.

PROBLEM Alert

Service: HTTP URL: http://72.29.66.95 Name: 72.29.66.95_http Tag: mY IP State: CRITICAL Date/Time: 3-21-2011 17:47:13 (GMT – 5) Additional Information: Connection refused. Failures From: EU, US and the recover comes in green

RECOVERY Alert

Service: HTTP URL: http://72.29.66.95 Name: 72.29.66.95_http Tag: mY IP State: OK Date/Time: 3-21-2011 18:12:03 (GMT – 5) Additional Information: HTTP response code: 200 Keeping your website up and available is easy with a service like Monitorus. If the reports and emails show that your server services are down you are half way to getting things fixed up and running smoothly again.

Open Source Monitoring

If you want to install and run your own Open Source monitoring service have a look https://www.icinga.org/download/ How are you monitoring your hosting server services?