Mike Griffiths

Downtime Prevention is not a new concept. It does seem, however, that there aren’t too many places doing it right.

One place I have found exceeding expectation though, is a web site offering downtime alerts and downtime notifications. The clever system checks your web site periodically for PHP errors, Apache errors, 404’s, 403’s, poor re-directs, etc. It also pings the server, does some TCP checks and does some HTTP header checks, all to see if your site is online and working as it should be. If there are no errors then all is kept silnet, if something is found though, you’ll receive a free email. These emails are limited to 4 a day so you don’t get 2,000 emails in your inbox should your site go down over night.

As a lot of us aren’t around 24/7 to check our emails but want to know the second our site goes down, this downtime alerts service also offers SMS alerts to your mobile phone. Where these alerts aren’t entirely free, they are cheap and capped to one a day, so you know you’re not going to be shelling out an arm and a leg. It’s dead easy to add credits and worth while doing in my opinion: your site might only go down once every 6 months and it’s oh so very easy to miss an email (be it because of spam, poor filters, or just human error), but you’ll never miss an SMS and you’ll see it straight away. You’re also able to do something about it straight away; with your phone in your hand ready to make the important phone call to your tech guy!

So, enough plugging – go and sign up.