Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Specialty Hosting and Markets : Question about Uptime Monitor Hosting Requirements

[dangerlarson]

Considering an uptime hosting business with a significant twist and investigating hardware requirements.

Looks like I'll need different server monitoring locations from which to check a site. Have some questions about that

1. If I ping a site from Texas the site may work but if I ping it from Paris, France it may not? Why is that?
2. How many server locations do you think the top uptime monitoring services have, to be able to provide a good product?
3. What would be the minimum of server locations globally to provide a reasonably accurate service?

I know this will require dedicated, but how much general bandwidth does something like this chew up if let's say there are 1000 subscribers all pinging max of 200 urls at the max amount of every 2 minutes? Does that bandwidth scale at the same rate if there were 10,000 or is there a significant base level of bandwidth this takes?

[Skylar MacMinn]

1) Could be connection issues with the bandwidth providers. A fiber cut, circuit down, etc.
2) Most of them have anywhere from 20-50 or more, depending on who they are
3) I would try to place a few in the USA, and some others in the UK, Europe, etc -- the more locations, the better.

[The Universes]

You can probably achieve this simply by using a good VPS provider. Once you detect a VPS is down, you can simply take it out of rotation and because you have other locations, its not a big deal.