Our web site is down!?!?!

These are the five words no IT team wants to hear, especially when delivered from the CEO or VP of operations. How can you prevent site outages? Your web servers are up to date, you have checked all connections numerous times, you have run QA on the the last code implemented, but yet inevitably the site will just some times go down usually through no fault of your own.

I have seen sites drop from hosted internet outages three loops upstream, and there was nothing that could be done until they were repaired. So what can you do, you can first be proactive not reactive. This is the key to a good web strategy.

There are a few open source options to detect ping that can be assigned to your key servers responsible for web applications, so you will know when the outage is occurring by email or SMS notification. Nagios is a great open source option for system monitoring at www.nagios.org. MOst free and some commercial solutions are based on this system and it comes highly recommended.

For pay solutions SiteUptime at www.sitesuptime.com has monitors that can be used similar to the systems we use at GTGweb for our monitoring. SiteUptime has the ability to monitor a service, which is key as sometimes the server is responsive on ping, but the actual application is down which can cause the web site t not display properly.

Remember the key to being proactive is being prepared and having the 10000 foot view at your fingertips and these two tools can allow you to have that ability.

Have a great week!

Thanks
Abel