reliability of hosted website.

JoeB-

Does anybody use a website monitoring service and could anyone advise on a Irish website hosting company that performs well. I always believed my hosting company was good until I used a website monitor that monitors my webpages every five minutes, it has revealed a very poor record IMO. In the last twenty three days or so there have been over 30 outages! :eek:

Report for last twenty three days.
Outages : 34
Downtime 11 hrs, 30 mins, 4 secs
Uptime% 97.962%

Is this pretty bad?

Cheers
Joe

Rollo Tamasi

Web hosts generally give a 99% uptime guarantee. I don't know if many hit that target. Does the report tell you when the downtime occurred? If it was for a half hour or maybe an hour once a week on a Tuesday at 4AM then I wouldn't worry about it but if happens regularly during the day then I would be worried.



What app are you using?

mneylon

If the monitor checks every 5 minutes and gets any kind of error it will mark the entire period as "down". Our main webserver kept giving me silly alerts from a 3rd party monitor until I realised that it kept checking when Apache did its nightly restart to rotate logs

JoeB-

Hi

Thanks for the input so far. Here's a small screenshot of a report, it shows loads of small individual outages so I'm a bit worried. Also one outages of over an hour which would mean twelve consequetive failed checks. Many detailed reports are available on the monitoring site but I only signed up for one months free trial so I've seven days left. It's a good site, see link.

http://www.alertra.com






Cheers
Joe

louie

JoeBallantine wrote:

Does anybody use a website monitoring service and could anyone advise on a Irish website hosting company that performs well. I always believed my hosting company was good until I used a website monitor that monitors my webpages every five minutes, it has revealed a very poor record IMO. In the last twenty three days or so there have been over 30 outages! :eek:

Report for last twenty three days.
Outages : 34
Downtime 11 hrs, 30 mins, 4 secs
Uptime% 97.962%

Is this pretty bad?

Cheers
Joe

One hosting company that never let me down was www.blacknight.ie

I have used many before but haven't found any like the one above.
Always on the ball.

wheres me jumpa

Guys is there any way of testing the vulnerability of your site? I can find network scannes but not much in the lines of a FREE(!) website test.

louie

A very good one is www.acunetix.com but it doesn't come free.

I don't know any that is actually free. If you come across any let me know.

vito

You could try www.siteuptime.com for checking the server uptime.

Free service for 30 minute checks and onw domain.

Paid for lower intervals and multiple sites.

You get email alerts when the test fails which is useful.

[edit] sorry just noticed that you were already using a 5 minute test. There are a number of forums dedicated to rating web hosts (mainly US based). Looking for links now but I found a great host based on recommendations from these sites.

mneylon

vito wrote:

There are a number of forums dedicated to rating web hosts (mainly US based). Looking for links now but I found a great host based on recommendations from these sites.

Most of the Irish hosts aren't listed on any of those, though you will find the odd reference

mneylon

wheres me jumpa wrote:

Guys is there any way of testing the vulnerability of your site? I can find network scannes but not much in the lines of a FREE(!) website test.

I don't think you'll find many free ones, but you could try looking on sourceforge...

You could also get the trial version of e-eye security scan (I think that's the name, but I could be slightly off)

wheres me jumpa

Free site security audit here...

http://www.acunetix.com/security-audit/

I have signed up for it and will report back with the results.

steve-hosting36

Also remember that sometimes the 'outages' reported by these systems are actually the monitoring system itself, or it's links to the site you are monitoring. It's an inprecise art at best unless done correctly

mneylon

Alertra is pretty accurate....

steve-hosting36

It is one of the better ones - if the OP's host is Irish - why not name names

steve-hosting36

Your links dont work..

louie

that because is a spammer. He just hit one of my website as well with dodgy emails.
I hate them. Nothing else to do - idiots.

JoeB-

Hi

I'm the OP. I haven't named the Irish company as I am giving them a chance to respond. I have given then several chances in the last few weeks which they haven't taken, tried to tell me my local browser cache was the problem :rolleyes: , then they'd say it was a single isolated incident.

This time I have explained the gravity of the current situation and am awaiting a response.

Can anyone post a report from a site like Alertra which shows relatively good uptime figures? I am afraid that most hosting companys have downtime, it's the fact that I'm monitoring on a five minute basis that shows up problems. I think I'll have to pay the $8.95 dollars a month to keep up the monitoring.

Rollo Tamasi asked what app I'm using.
It's a php site with a MySQL database hosted on a Windows system. (I think)

Someone mentioned that the monitor itself could be down... not very likely, they can check my site from multiple locations whereas my site can be served up from only one. Alertra checks from several distributed geographic locations.

My hosting partner has a 100% network uptime guarantee, however it doesn't guarantee my site will be up, this sounds like blatant misuse of technical language to me and may be reported to the advertising standards body if the situation isn't resolved.

Cheers
Joe

Ph3n0m

Be warned - do not go naming this company

boards.ie does not need another headache nor are boards.ie the support forums for any hosting companies - either Irish or international

Deal with the company or cut your losses and go elsewhere (consider this a warning to all future posters)

JoeB-

Hi
Just an update on this whole affair... I'm the OP.

The company admitted they had a problem, one of several hundred hosted sites had a php script problem which was using up all the available resources on the server and so everybodies site was suffering, including the Hosting companies own webpages.

Problem script has now been identified and removed. No preventative action can be taken to prevent this from happening again, my site is at the mercy of other webmasters coding. The company also admit they knew there was a serious problem while they were telling me there were no problems, their system administrators and Network Operations Center were performing an 'intense investigation' to determine the problem. The general manager responded to my complaint in the end as I required senior input.

They have credited me a months hosting charge but I'd prefer reliable hosting to free hosting. I am still with them... silly eh? I am on five minute monitoring with SiteProbe (€3.23 a month, very basic reporting) which has only showed two minor outages over 5,000 checks over two weeks so it seems ok now.

They have a 100% network uptime guarantee but I'd be surprised if anybody could claim under it as the conditions to claim are so hard to fulfill, simply your hosted website been down means nothing and doesn't qualify. For example during the last crisis even though FTP access was down at times, email was occasionally unavailable, MySQL was down at times and the website was down, this wasn't considered to be 'network unavailability'.

Cheers
Joe

mneylon

JoeBallantine wrote:

Hi
... including the Hosting companies own webpages.

So they only have one server?

JoeBallantine wrote:

They have a 100% network uptime guarantee but I'd be surprised if anybody could claim under it as the conditions to claim are so hard to fulfill, simply your hosted website been down means nothing and doesn't qualify. For example during the last crisis even though FTP access was down at times, email was occasionally unavailable, MySQL was down at times and the website was down, this wasn't considered to be 'network unavailability'.

Network and daemons are two separate things.

If, for example, MySQL was unavailable due to server load then you can't claim anything on the basis of network uptime.

Unfortunately a lot of people don't see that and just see the "100%" part without really paying attention to what it refers to or what it means in practical terms.

JoeB-

blacknight wrote:

So they only have one server?

Network and daemons are two separate things.

I would imagine they have many servers, they offer 'full racks' and dedicated servers... I was very surprised that their own website was affected. Servers are located in the Heathrow Data Center.

I don't know what a daemon is...

Cheers
Joe

mneylon

Do they own their own equipment or are they just a reseller of someone else?

steve-hosting36

Irish host - Heathrow Datacentre? Sounds like a Rackspace.com reseller.

mneylon

steve-hosting36 wrote:

Irish host - Heathrow Datacentre? Sounds like a Rackspace.com reseller.

Ah ha
I should have spotted that one a mile away