Hi there,

I am revising a short Perl script I found on the Internet to monitor my web hosters so that I can have some objective way to tell when the hosting servers are down.

I have thought of running this as a cron job on one of my hosters but I don't know if they would be too happy about this script running day and night every 15 minutes. Even if I could I am not sure a cron job could be set up to run more often than hourly??

Anyway I was just wondering if anyone might have suggestions as to how I could run such a script? From where using what service? It's a short script that simply queries things like the HTTP server, SSH Telnet service, and so forth. Sending me an email if one of the services is not responding.

I am checking out a new hoster and want to have some way of objectively checking whether their servers are up as much as they say they are. They probably are but last night for example I could not FTP to my hoster, connect to the hosting web site, connect to my web site, and a tracer route to their site showed it timed out when it got to their servers.

Yet when contacted I was told there had been no down time. Perhaps it was a fluke but nevertheless I want to check things out very carefully before I start relying on them to be my main hoster.

I have considered paying for a monitoring service but why pay for one when I can monitor things using my own script? For free. If I can find a way to run it every 15 minutes that is ;).

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Carlos

Cron jobs can be done in any interval. I have ones that run every minute. What control panel does your host use? If they are on cpanel all you have to do is go in to cron jobs and set the script to run.

EasyMonitor http://www.easymonitor.com/index.html is free and would provide a third-party input that would help in proving any downtime.

BTW, have you got that Perl script working yet? Always interested in good scripts.

instead of writing your own scripts, why not use netsaint ?

it's already been proven to work and lots of ppl use it with success.

Thanks for everyone's input.

NetSaint seems way too involved for a simple monitoring of my web site.

EasyMonitor does not allow an end-user like me to use it's monitoring in the licence agreement. You must own your server or be paying someone to host it for you.

I looked at about ten others and they are all way too complicated or overblown with features for what I want to do.

The script I am modifying can be found at http://www.webreference.com/perl/tutorial/6/

It isn't my script per se but it seems like it will do the job of simply monitoriing my site. I didn't realize that I could set a cron job to run a program up to every minute. Thanks for that insight.

Carlos

A hosting company I am checking out does not appear to allow cron job to run every so many minutes or even hourly and I am wondering if this is standard throughout the shared hosting industry?

I want to run my monitoring script every 15 minutes so that I can have some objective way to check how well my site is being hosted. Especially during the first month of going with a new host.

By the way the reason I did not upload or give a link to my script is because it contains some methodologies which might give some hacker insight into how my site is run. Which I don't want to do. My script is based on the Moniker script (see previous post) if anyone is interested in modifying Moniker to suit their own needs.

Any input on the above?

Thanks.

Carlos

I know from my point-of-view, the importance is placed on how long the CPU is tied up -- and I don't care what script is being used or when. As long as load is acceptable is what I think the Standard is. It's up to each individual Hoster though, to determine their own level of acceptable. The one you are dealing with sounds like they have a very small one.

The one you are dealing with sounds like they have a very small one.
Holy cow - that could be slander :D