Web Server Alarms

Do you own a website, or do you perhaps work as the webmaster of a website?

If your website becomes popular, you’re going to eventually need a web server alarm. What’s a web server alarm, you ask? A web server alarm, (not be confused with our alarm website) is perhaps better known as a host monitor. A host monitor is an application, a piece of software or an online service that automatically monitors the uptime on your webserver and notifies you with some kind of an alarm if the web server ever goes offline.

When we’d originally created Online Clock back in March of 2006, we knew we’d had a great idea: the world’s first Online Alarm Clock – an alarm clock you use directly in your web browser. Nothing to download. Nothing to install. What could be easier?

Perhaps it was due to the fact that this idea was so great, combined with the fact that we stubbornly refuse to make our alarm clock more complicated by adding extra features that aren’t necessary, that has resulted in our site’s success.

Whatever the case, with well over a million unique visitors to our online alarm clock website each month, we feel a strong responsibility to make sure that our servers have an incredibly high amount of uptime.

In the course of being online now for over three and a half years, Online Clock has gone through at least a half a dozen webhosters!

Many of them simply couldn’t handle the traffic. And, as soon as we discovered this, we simply said goodbye and went in search of a better webhoster, a company who could guarantee us an extraordinary percentage of uptime. (And yes, without naming names, we are very happy with our current hoster.)

So, for those of you reading this who might also work in the internet business – how do you go about setting up a web server alarm, a service that alarms you if your website happens to go down for any reason?

Well, the first thing you can do is search Google for something like “web host monitor“. You’re sure to find a lot of valuable results.

But, perhaps even more helpful, here are some of the web server alarms we’ve personally tested:

Host-Tracker.com : they apparently have a free version that you can use, but for us this site was a bit confusing. It was also difficult, at least as of the time we used it, to set it up to send text messages to our mobile phone number in Germany. Still, perhaps the service has improved since then. Especially if they still offer a free version, you might want to give them a try.
Next up is Mon.itor.us : they seem to have a free version, and then a paid version located here. Definitely sign up for the free version. This is a nice service to use to augment an even more professional host monitoring service. It could be that the paid version is also excellent – we’ve never tested it.
Pingdom.com : as far as we’re concerned, this is the big daddy of web server alarms. This is currently the main host monitoring service we used to monitor OnlineClock.net’s servers.

Out of all the various website monitoring alarm services out there, why did we settle for Pingdom.com?

Well, it has a lot of useful features.

Out of all the services of this kind that we’ve tested, it’s the one that makes it easiest to get text messages sent to your mobile phone if your server goes offline for any reason. And this is true even if your cell phone’s network is located far away from North America.

Pingdom also has a vast network of hosts located all across the globe that ping your servers at your desired interval, in order to check to see if your site is online. This is important, because sometimes there are network problems on the internet that may make a website unreachable from a certain location, and such network problems often have absolutely nothing to do with your own web server! Since Pingdom pings from a huge variety of geographical regions across the globe, you can easily differentiate between local network problems and potential problems with your web server. (In truth, however, this is a feature that all serious host monitoring services offer.)

One other important reason why Pingdom is a good service: it enables you to monitor for the existence of a given text string on your website. This is important because, depending on your setup, it could be that your web server is actually still running, even though your website is no longer accessible. A simple ping test might return that your server’s still up, even though your website is down. Pingdom can alarm you per email and/or text message whenever a certain text string (let’s say your copyright notice or something which should always be online) can no longer be found.

But the final argument for choosing Pingdom is the stunning list of references they have on their website: if Alexa, Last.fm, TechCrunch, CNET, the Washington Post, Mashable and even Twitter are all using this server alarm service, this company must be doing something right! …and it might even be good enough for OnlineClock.net