Hey hosting users and hosts - if you've been online more than a couple months then chances are you've gotten a spam from internetseer.com claiming that your web site was down.

Well it would appear they are a total scam as we recently received a few emails from them ourselves saying they could not access our web site, and even went so far as stating what error it was they received.

We have checked our log files and there have been NO errors what so ever to support their claim.

These jerks are making hosts look bad by telling their customers their site was down when in truth they have NO IDEA.

I'm curious - hosts, what would you do if one of your competitors just started emailing your clients saying "their web site was down" with nothing to back it up?

If you are so concerned about third party companies spamming your customers about their sites being offline, why don't you put out a notice to customers explaining the situation and filter internetseer.com emails before they're delivered?

uhh - because I don't have hosting customers. I just find it BS that they tell me my server went down when it did not go down.

Just filter it like every other piece of spam and call it a day.

also, if you notice in the internetseer emails you get, they advertise their hosting services.


total scam.

Yup - i know you are right cipher. I should not let anyone's spam get to me, otherwise I'm gonna live a short life. :)

InternetSeer is evil. We have at least one client who uses their services for monitoring. There have been a few occasions when we have received a letter informing us of our downtime from this client, he always quotes the internetseer report. With the last one he received, we had rebooted the server.. the report was that we had over an hour and a half of downtime! Try explaining this to a mad client, of course internetseer IS accurate. I don't know where they come up with these reports, or how 3-5 minutes of actual downtime turns into an hour an half according to them. I wouldn't recommend this service to anyone, as far as I'm concerned it's a scam.

I had an e-mail from them quite a while back telling me our site was down. I checked - not a problem. I then ran a trace to their domain and noticed things were pretty spotty at their end. I just figured they couldn't see our site because of problems at their end. :)

Greg Moore

Hmmm - that gives me an idea Tallon. I'm going to set up a site and subscribe to the service to test their accuracy. Let's find out if this is truly a monitoring service at all, or just a marketing service in sheeps clothing. :)

Originally posted by Tallon
I don't know where they come up with these reports, or how 3-5 minutes of actual downtime turns into an hour an half according to them.It's because InternetSeer reports in 15 minutes increments so if the site was down when InternetSeer was checking for uptime it will report 1 instance of a 15 min. downtime block. Say you come back online for 12 minutes then you have to reboot again during another InterneetSeer check then it will report another 15 min. downtime block. It's all a timing issue.

If that's how it works, then the most that it should have reported would be 29 minutes rather than 1.5 hours.

We have a client that uses their service and complained that the site was down, occasionally. Well the problem was that that client was on a firewall protected server. The firewall was blocking some of the port scanning that Internetseer does.

InternetSeer reports in 1 hour increments, not 15 minute increments.

Thanks Steve, I went and checked on it and you're correct. Thanks for the information, that helps to explain a lot. :)

Everyone should send an email to Chuck Lively, their sales contact at chuck.lively@internetseer.com and tell him you noticed his web site was down.

Originally posted by steve93138
InternetSeer reports in 1 hour increments, not 15 minute increments. Oops ... my bad. Thanks for the clarification.

Hehe... that would be great :D

From what I have seen... the reports are accurate +or- 45 minutes. Now, when you are looking to get a credit for an uptime policy, +or- 45 minutes generally is not accurate enough. ;)


Originally posted by lpguitars
Everyone should send an email to Chuck Lively, their sales contact at chuck.lively@internetseer.com and tell him you noticed his web site was down.

They do give the wrong amounts of down time. Then when they give you a weekly report they will send out two with different informtion on each.

I would have to agree that it's not an accurate service.

Greetings:

Your log files would have little to tell you about your server being inaccessible from the outside world.

Your server can be up and running, but if no one can get to it, it is down.

Furthermore, it is entirely possible for certain parts of the world to access your servers, and other parts not be able to get to your server.

Thank you.