Once you set up you blog and have a bunch of niche sites running AdSense, making money maybe, you’re happy. Right? Right? Wrong!
Apparently I’m never happy, and must think of fresh new ways to improve on everything and make every small glitch dissapear.
One of those improvement-eureka moments was yesterday, when I said to myself that it’d be great to monitor my server to find what uptime it has.
Among other tools that are available on the net, I chose Basicstate.com. Why? Because it’s free and could answer my question. It runs checkups on the server every 15 minutes, sending email alerts if the server is down and allowing for basic statistics later on, for analysis.
Boy was I surprised when I got my first alert!
What?! - I said, this is impossible! This can’t be true with the top rated hosting plan I’m paying for! $7/month, mind you. Outrageous… (not sure if you’re getting the sarcasm, but yes, it’s me being sarcastic)
You can imagine how surprised I was when I got my second alert half an hour later. After that my face was longer than a horse’s and I went to sleep with heavy thoughts.
Today I received a few additional alerts to my mail. When trying to browse to my site immediately upon receiving the alert everything was Okay, except one time what I indeed couldn’t access any of my sites. I guess the outages are very brief. Basicstate doesn’t report the duration of the outage.
So I guess, as usual, this coin has two sides:
I really don’t care anymore- Every hosting has outages and that’s a fact. I’m sure every single one of them is doing everything they can to improve their stability, since competition is very strong, so If a server is down for a few minutes a day, no biggie.
Have fun.
- Alex
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Hey Alex,
I had a little chuckle over your final conclusion, sometimes ignorance really is bliss LOL
It would be more helpful if you could actually know the duration of the outage so you can take action when something really is wrong
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Yea, I guess the assumption is probably that you will hurry up to check what is wrong every time you get an alert, and talk to the support if it persists.
I see that this tool could be useful if you want to compare the stability of the provider compared that what was promised to you when signing up (or even before signing up, if you know a site that is hosted there).
Most providers promise exceptional uptimes, like 99% and up.. This could be a good way to check if it is indeed what you’d get.
Mine is currently at 97% according to the statistics, but I would wait for a bigger sample, as they maybe running routine maintenance at the beginning of the month…