do you use a program to tell you when your host is down?
 

do you guys use programs/email alerts to tell you when your host goes down? i was useing internetseer but it doesn't look like it's working right

we recently used the swedeguynetwork to let us know our host had changed servers but uh hadn't copied any of our info.. and if we waited on them.. all our sites would still be DOWN.. so i'd say that notification system worked perfectly..

thanks swedey |headbang| u rock!!

you can try http://siteuptime.com/

or download A-1 monitor from download.com

also used that one - made a good job

I'm using since 1998 (or so) the free service of internetseer and think it does its job well enough (for a no-pay-option) - consider that they're monitoring 10s-of-thousands domains all the time, so a delay of something between 10 and 25 minutes until an alert is sent doesn't sound too bad; and once they've picked up a fault they seem to re-visit every 5-10 minutes, send more alerts every 30, and finally send an 'all clear' message once the server's back up...

It doesn't mean that I'm actually checking my emails that often - so sometimes an alert sits in there for 2-3 hours, and the 'all clear' is usually the last one - LOL!

The only complaint I'd have is that they don't send alerts when servers are unusually slow.

There is also a service which sends out SMS messages, which sounds kinda useful (except to people like me, who hate mobiles/handies/cell phones - whatever you call'em).
XXXHostit offers it to all their customers. Sorry, since I'm not into these things (see above) I can't tell you more.

i use the free internetseer thing too, only he wont give me the message all the time when my host is down, i always find out myself, because i am all day on the net and have to check my emails every 5 minutes as soon it takes to long my emails come in i know my host got shit!:D

i use this too. becouse i have lots of domains and servers and i can not control all of them inone time. If anything happened this program send me request about this and time when my server have been down.

I do a very simple test. I have a few mailboxes on each server, and do a bulk read fairly frequently. If I get delays or failed connections, I go and investigate. I guess this isn't the smartest way to check though. :)

I wish my server would go down and just put me out of my misery. You just can't kill that damned machine. I've installed all kinds of programs and did some tweaks, all by myself, without an ounce of knowledge, and yet that cocksucker keeps running.

Go figure.

Anyway, a couple of years ago I used Internetseer. It was ok for what it is.

I use the board - the last time we went down for maintenance, my ICQ went nuts :D

hmm well if internetseer does work this is a little odd cuz it's saying the server i'm on is down 24 mins a day :(

Day Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun Weekly
Total
Date 04/04 04/05 04/06 04/07 04/08 04/09 04/10
Outages 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 7
Time on error 24:00 24:00 24:00 24:00 24:00 24:00 24:00 168:00
% Uptime 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
Connect time 0.11 0.11 0.14 0.14 0.11 0.11 0.11 0.12

I run this simple script from cron at home to check on my webserver and e-mail an alarm to my cellphone if there is a problem:

http://stein.cshl.org/~lstein/talks/...icks/sos2.html

Nice script... Except, what's the "ping" interval to check for downtime?

I have it setup in cron to run the script once every 5 minutes.

Thanks for that script, that's awesome :)

I use Internetseer also, seems to work well in my own experience, plus for the technically incompetent such as myself it's easy ro run :)

I have a server with NatNet so I don't need to use a program :)

I was using Internerseer and was happy with it.

I hit the refresh button on my laptop every 30 second to make sure my server is still up. :D

Netmechanic
 

I often do a free check at netmechanic to have them check my page. If they can not access the site from their side either, I assume my site is down.

http://www.netmechanic.com/toolbox/html-code.htm