Hi again all,

I'm thinking of setting up a package for QWK.Mon that would offer independent verification of your company's uptime record. It would operate similarly to regular QWK.Mon monitoring - that is, multiple stations would check your hosting servers on a regular schedule and record any downtime.

Of course, to be useful and credible, a couple things would have to happen:

- All your public hosting servers would need to be monitored

- The monitoring interval would need to be pretty fine-grained, say 5 or 10 minutes.

- A reporting page would need to be available that you can point the public to, indicating current and historical uptime averages.

I'm thinking of offering this all in a package, with pricing based on the number of hosting servers.

Any interest out there in such a service?

I think that would be a very useful service. A somewhat related service I think would be quite appreciated would be SLA monitoring -- ie when a server is unavailable to track down the cause therefore, so that any applicable refunds can be received from network providers.

I love the idea, but dislike the fee. :stickout

But he do you get potential customers to believe these stats?

I would go for that. Couldn't be more than, say, the price of a cheap hosting account.

energy:

In regard to getting customers to believe the stats:

Since they're provided by a third-party, and the methodology used to produce the results will be fully documented, that should address most all concerns of legitimacy. QWK.Net won't, of course, rate itself.

cperciva:

It would definitely be useful to have accurate SLA reporting. We have to take care to distinguish between a host outage and a network outage, though. There are two likely ways to do this:

- monitor a stable, "head-end" appliance like a router or firewall. If it's unreachable, the circuit is likely down.

- Only count "all host unreachable" outages toward network SLA reporting. This would require some complicated query logic, but is possible.

mastersites:

Few things worth having are free. I've got to feed the kid somehow. ;)

Yep, I know :(

good luck with your idea... sounds great so far! ;)

Originally posted by Travis
It would definitely be useful to have accurate SLA reporting. We have to take care to distinguish between a host outage and a network outage, though.

My vague notion was that when http requests failed you could first ping and then traceroute to the host; you don't need to be able to to work out who is responsible for which outage, as long as you can say "for 1.5 hours your host was inaccessible by http and ping, and traceroutes stopped at a.b.c.d" the network administrator should be able to turn that into numbers relevant to their specific SLA.

Man this sounds like a great idea but have to ask any way. For your users like me that pay the price for your 5 min checking on 15 hosts would this come free for us or an add-on with a discount or some thing?


I really like this idea.. Could we display the results on our server so we could make the page look like what we want or display it on yours how would this work..

Hi Brad,

The deal will very likely include regular monitoring service as part of the price. After all, if we're monitoring all those hosts that closely, we may as well go ahead and page if there's a problem - it's not like it's a great deal of extra system overhead. When pricing is established, you can decide if it will be a good deal for you.

The page will need to be served from our server so end users can be assured that it's unmodified and authoritative. You'll want it to be clear that it's coming from a third party anyway.

Thanks Travis

That is a good point about it coming from your server.. Thanks fo rgetting back to me i can't to check it out should be cool.. :)