hello:

I have a bunch of sites hosted with different hosting providers.

Trying to determine which host is providing the best up-time.

wondering what people are using these days to track this kind of info ?

Are you running scripts on the actual server in question ? what about those services ( seem pricey ) such as Watchdog and AlerSite ?

sorry if the question has been asked before but Search is currently not enabled ...

cheers !

Try alertra.com, I have already test their service and so far accurate anough since they monitor your site from at least 2 computers.

I use easymonitor.com, internetseer.com, and websitepulse.net, all of them are good, and I use each one for a different purpose.

thanks for the info.

Which time interval do you choose ? Every 15 minutes seems about right to me -- but curious what you use ?

cheers!

Thumbsup for internetseer, great service..

You can try WhatsUP, it is an actual program you run on your computer. It has options to page you, call you, email you and sound alarms when stuff is down. That is what I run on multiple computers on multiple outside connections, when something goes down all hell breaks loose =)

jic, sounds like a great piece of software, whats the url?

WhatsUp (http://www.ipswitch.com/Products/WhatsUp/index.html)

We have our own off network script that pings all servers every minute and sends an SMS message to the mobile phone of any tech on call. :)

And the same script pings that server, just in case. ;)

I have the same SMS thing setup at InternetSeer, it will page my phone, if me site goes down.

Sites and services like internetseer are indeed excellent but fall short of being a decent solution for a host with quite a few servers. Sure, alertra.com has a good service but PRICEY. I'm sure most people keep the costs down and ping their servers every 15 - 30 mins.

In my experience, customers will think 15-30 mins downtime is unacceptable. Also, what if alertra goes down? These are the things we factored in when developing a solution for ourselves. It was cheaper to develop our own script and run it on an off network server that we also have root access too, just in case.

I agree, and if they go down, it will show up as the host being down, and therefore angry clients :angry:

I can't speak for other monitoring companies, but we have redundant central servers in separate locations on separate networks. It's very unlikely that we would ever be down for very long.

As far as pricing, remote monitoring is not always the cheapest solution because it requires Internet bandwidth that must be purchased. However, remote monitoring is often a much better solution as it will detect problems outside the firewall. Remote services that monitor from multiple points are even better since they aren't likely to mistake failures in some part of their own network for failures in a monitored host.

Alertra currently does all the uptime checking of hosts listed in FindMyHosting.com

I have only good things to say about their service & the professional way their company operates.

It's not very likely they would go down themselves - they have multiple servers in different locations doing the monitoring, so if one station did go down then another server would pick up the slack.

They also offer some neat web site functionality checking - basically a simple script defines rules than can move through a site in the same way that a user would - following links & performing logins - this offers an extra check on reliability beyond just the server being up and running

just my 2 cents

alertra.com are watching 3 of my servers. Had a script written that puts all 3 on the 1 account. The servers are monitored for a successful page loading too. You can even set it up so as to hunt for a specific keyword each time. Not just pinging the ports, as we all know how useless that can be if apache or bind is down.

I get an SMS if something is amiss. Very happy so far. Communications with their staff has been excellent so far. :)

ServersAlive
http://www.woodstone.nu/salive/

You can also try EyeOnSite (http://virdi-software.com/eyeonsite) . You run it on your pc and it can monitor http, ftp smtp and pop3. Free to monitor 2 sites.