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Get Automatically Notified By SMS If Your Server's Down (17)

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You've got a great campaign. You're spending $x,xxx on traffic every day. And then one morning, you come in to a revenue report that's less than half of what you expected. Why?

Because, you discover, while you were out for dinner, your server crashed, and it's been down for 12 hours, eating your money and giving you nothing back.

If you've never experienced this particular nightmare, you're lucky. Sooner or later, almost any server tends to go horribly wrong.

But handily, you can find out whether that's happening - before it costs you a night's revenue.

Using Pingdom To Check Your Server - Free

There are a whole bunch of server monitoring tools out there, but my favourite is still Pingdom.com. It'll check your server every minute, and send you an email and an SMS if it can't get through.

To get started, go to www.pingdom.com and click on "Free Signup" at the bottom right. It'll ask for your email address and a password, as usual. Then you'll get to this screen:



Once you've clicked "Create" next to "Create A Check", you'll get this screen up:



The free account only checks one page, but that's not too much of a problem - we just want to know if our web server, database and PHP are still running, and that'll be equally obvious on any page on the server. Either monitor your best-performing landing page - but remember that Pingdom will add some phantom clicks - or monitor a landing page you're not using if you don't want to contaminate your stats.

Importantly, DON'T just monitor a HTML page without any PHP or tracking. That'll only tell you if the web server's still running. If you decide to monitor a page that isn't interacting with your tracking software, and your MySQL server burns down, falls over and sinks into the swamp, Pingdom will happily carry on telling you everything's fine!

You want to make sure that the page you're monitoring interacts with all the systems on your server that you're concerned about.

Two other points:

• The free plan only includes 20 SMS alerts a month. That shouldn't normally be a problem, but if your server has been unstable a lot, remember to check you haven't run out - or you might get a nasty surprise.
• The default settings for downtime and check frequency are fine most of the time. Unless you have a specific reason to alter them, they'll work fine at the defaults.

Once you've clicked "Create Check", that's it - if your server goes down, you'll be notified. It's as simple as that.

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Interesting thanks.
Anybody know if they successfully send SMS outside US too ?

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Yep, they're worldwide - they're actually based in Sweden.

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They have an ios app too, so you can get push notifications if sms doesn't work. From what I know, there's no limit to the # of push notifications you can get.

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I've found the Android app to be a bit unreliable, FYI - but it's a good backup. The IOS one may be less rubbish!

(Arguably the Twitter direct messages you can also get are even better.)

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Finally I found this, help me save some money, I'm using other service which check periodically when my tracker and database is down

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Weird, it did not successfully detect my mysql is down

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I've become more fond of NewRelic recently. Used CopperEgg for a while, eventually tried NewRelic again and thought "what was I smoking" when I said didn't like NewRelic much. The free plan is pretty good and you can pretty readily justify the worth of the paid plans when running serious traffic. MySQL wise you can drill down pretty deep, it's enterprise level awesome. If you're running a lot of stuff internationally as well (with landing pages) the real user monitoring is probably gold.

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@zeno - Interesting. What's the slowdown like from using NewRelic monitoring? If it's as good as you say, I sense a tutorial coming on...

@hd2010 - What page did you set it up to monitor? Pingdom will only detect if a web page is down - for more sophisticated stuff like checking databases, you need to look at NewRelic or other solutions. (Or you could just set up a monitoring page which refuses to load if it can't connect to your database, of course.)

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I'm pretty sure the real user monitoring (rum.js script that is automatically loaded) runs after browser rendering is complete so doubt there is any real slow down there. As for the agent that sends server/php info etc I couldn't say what effect they might have.

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@caurmen : I've setup a page which echo when mysql server is down using php, I guess the page need to outout a http error such as 502 or 403 or similar error code, in order for pingdom to successfully detect it, I'm using hyperspin now, paid little money to get it done.

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@hd2010 - Yep, that should work!

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Wish I had done this before today since I have a lot of stuff hosted on Bluehost, which apparently has been down most of the night and this morning.

Lesson learned, and thanks for putting this info out here!

-Cim G

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I suggest you change host, regardless of share hosting, vps or dedicated, there are always hosts that suck the most as well as some are really recommended, use the search button in here or go to webhostingtalk.com offer section to get some good deal.

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@cimgroup - Ugh, sorry to hear that. Dodgy hosting is a nightmare.

You may find this useful:

STM Guide To How To Choose The Right Web Host For Your Affiliate Marketing

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Hostgator/bluehost/hostmonster. All Endurance International Group now.. same shit all consumer quality junk. it's like buying a kia to take to a car show..

:-)


Or you could just recommend us.. which has been proven by the affiliate community as one of the best... Web hosting talk is full of nobody hosting companys and 14 year old kids who think a reseller account makes them a webhost.

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@tyler : yup, BeyondHosting is a good company but also webhostingtalk do have some gems if you know what you're looking for, can't bindly choosing a host, headache afterward

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