Check, Log and React on Website Downtimes

A rule of thumb is that websites or servers go down in an inappropriate moment either when you are sleeping, at work or in another location where you cannot check if your website or server is still up and running. A website that is not available for eight ore more consecutive hours can do serious harm to its reputation and possible revenue that is generated.

The Integrio Uptime Scout monitors your websites in an interval that can be specified between 30 seconds to 30 minutes and logs any failure to connect to it. The log can be useful to create a uptime statistic for your website which can be used to decided if it is time to change the hoster. Logfiles are useful but do not change the fact that the website is currently unavailable.

The software can be configured to send out an email to an unlimited number of email recipients informing them that the website is currently unavailable and also when the website is available again. A clever way to use this would be to send the email straight to your mobile phone or PDA which would ensure that the downtime would be kept to a minimum.

While those two features are nice for themselves the ability to run a program or script on the local computer when a check fails is probably the main reason for using the software. Each website can point to it’s own script or application. Those scripts could for instance restart apache, reboot a dedicated server or send an email to the hoster informing them about the downtime and asking for assistance.

There is only one negative aspect. The software has to be running to monitor your websites and servers. I know that some users can’t or won’t leave their computers running all the time but I do not know of a comparable service that is running as a web service. Would not that be a niche market ?