I'm thinking of cross-referencing QWK.Mon's per-server uptime data with WHOIS records to come up with a list of "most reliable web hosts."

Any comments on this? Good idea, bad idea?

I would like to see a 3rd party list of hosts uptime.

I wouldn't mind seeing a list of that

Then we can really see the truth!

Originally posted by Travis
I'm thinking of cross-referencing QWK.Mon's per-server uptime data with WHOIS records to come up with a list of "most reliable web hosts."

Any comments on this? Good idea, bad idea?

An independent list of uptimes would attract much scrutiny from those on it. Therefore, you might want to solidify your infrastructure, and wait until the data you intend to publish is representative of that new infrastructure.

As I mentioned in a prior message on this topic, I'd like to see your servers on different backbone providers, and the results of those different servers compared and contrasted, before I regard an uptime list as anything more than a interesting curiosity.

Mike,

Thanks for your comment - that's an extremely relevant point. We have, however, done just that. QWK.Mon now does full monitoring and cross-checking from multiple stations on multiple providers, so that will help the reliability of the data a lot.

Originally posted by Travis
Mike,

Thanks for your comment - that's an extremely relevant point. We have, however, done just that. QWK.Mon now does full monitoring and cross-checking from multiple stations on multiple providers, so that will help the reliability of the data a lot.


Thanks for the quick follow-up and congratulations on the quick work! Only a few days ago you said it was only a plan.

Do you plan to describe and display a diagram of your monitoring infrastructure on your site? A detailed description of your methodology would only help to increase the credibility of your published reports.

Thanks for the quick follow-up and congratulations on the quick work! Only a few days ago you said it was only a plan.

Ah, the wonders of being a small company... you can be nimble. :) The system was ready anyway; the code just needed to be finalized and turned online.

I've given some thought to including a diagram of the monitoring infrastructure and methodology. More information is always better, and you're right in that it would help increase credibility. I'll get the graphic guy on it. ;)

Correct me if I am wrong, but your service is only as good as your servers uptime, am i correct? Therefore, your stats "may" be a little off? Im not really sure of it but that is just my 5 cents.

The servers are set up in a failover configuration. If the primary server goes down, a secondary server notices and takes over the monitoring schedule. (The wonders of database replication.)

In that case, its aaaaaaall good man, sounds like a great idea.

That said, the primary monitoring server has only gone down once since it was brought online in February. That was due to a loose power cord being bumped when other maintenance was being performed in the rack. :)

I have had people send in reports from them to us, that said we have had servers down when they were not, so its definatly not perfect... you should make it very clear to the users that the stats you provide are not fail safe and any number of things can cause them to be inaccurate.

-Brendan

Aloha
OK one question will this show the uptime of servers or will it just show the connection ?
we had been throught this before ;)
just want to make sure before you do this that the idea of uptime on a server is seperated from network to that server
big dif in these two and you would have to cross this with actual servers that you are monitoring to be acurate.

Brendan,

That's true - if there is a connectivity problem between us and you, your servers will show as down in QWK.Mon even though they're not. With the new active multi-host monitoring, though, the accuracy will be drastically increased. (If we can't reach you from multiple ISPs, there's a definite problem.)


Honu,

Uptime will be calculated across all monitoring stations. That is, a host won't be counted as "down" unless it's inaccessible from all stations during that period.

Really, we care about overall uptime, so it doesn't matter if it's the server that's down or the network.

Aloha that sounds cool then is that something new since our last convo on the topic then that was implimented ??

Yep, some code improvements have been brought online since our last conversation.

Travis,

I like the uptime reports idea. We've been looking for a third-party monitoring company to provide that type of data for us.

Your current service only seems to allow for private viewing of the uptime data upon logging in, but if that information could be made public, it could be very valuable to web hosts for sales and SLA purposes.

Phoenix,

You're right, and we've had some requests along those lines. An option will be added soon to authorize public disclosure of host stats.