Get a free smokedetector for your server

I first became interested in monitoring the uptime of web services late in the nineties when i got Debian running on a Olivetti M4 in my parents basement and started hosting my personal website, as i recall it was about half as cool this awesome website for the 1998 movie Space Jam.

After running the service for a month I realized that the internet service provider had kept track of the uptime. On the bill, right next to the boring number that my parents had noticed (~2500 kr) it was stated how many minutes my server had been connected to the internet through our highspeed 56kbps dial-up modem.

Today i don’t keep servers in my parents basement anymore, but instead rely on a ever increasing mesh of web based services and cloud providers. And i suspect you do to..

So if one of these services going down will influence you, or your business, i recommend you take two minutes to setup monitoring with one, or both, of the following services so you are the first to know when the service is offline instead of waiting for “the bill” at the end of the month.

I especially recommend to monitor stuff like payment gateways, hosted emailservices, and offsite backup locations. Sometimes the early warning allows the problem to be mitigated before it has any impact, and other times it serves as useful documentation to negotiate a discount.. a courtesy tweet about 5 min downtime once got me 1 years worth of free service so i suspect many other service providers are very susceptible to the technique.

• uptimerobot.com – free monitoring of 50 sites/services in 5 minute intervals.
• pingdom.com – $15 for monitoring of 10 sites/services in 1 minute intervals.