If your website or server experienced a problem which took it offline or made it intolerably slow, how would you know about it? You're certainly not going to be visiting the site every hour of the day and night to make sure it's working well! So you can maintain high levels of uptime whilst concentrate on running your business and not maintaining your infrastructure, all our services either include free monitoring services, or these can be added to any service.
If a problem is encountered, alerts are sent by e-mail, SMS, Java mobile application and API to any number of contacts you nominate. In addition, our 24/7 NOC is alerted to any connectivity or common service issues on all dedicated servers and colocation devices, so we can proactively investigate potential problems before you even contact us!
Unlike many monitoring services offered by our competitors, ours has been developed in-house to be fully redundant using 3 nodes in separate data centres and on distinct networks. This ensures we avoid false alerts due to problems with any individual node, site or network. In addition, this means we can reliably monitor our own network independently.
We currently offer monitoring for these services:
- Connectivity: We ping your device every minute; each node which fails to connect produces a traceroute to aid in diagnostics
- Web pages: Our HTTP monitor verifies your web page loads in a reasonable time, returns a non-error HTTP status code, and it can use regular expressions to match the page content returned against the expected content of the page - useful to ensure scripts and databases are working correctly.
- Remote logins: Our system verifies that SSH and FTP services are responding to new connections correctly on any designated ports.
- Generic TCP ports: You specify a port number and our monitoring system ensures that connections to the port can be opened.
- Mail servers: Our monitors can connect to standard SMTP, POP3 and IMAP mail servers to ensure they are operational.
If you have a requirement for monitoring another service, we'll be happy to consider adding support for it. Please contact us to discuss this.
Integration with Our API
We are one of only a few UK providers to offer a comprehensive application programming interface (API), allowing you to develop software routines which can interact with our hosting platform and automate key tasks. For example, you may use both our monitoring service and our authoritative DNS services, and have configured the DNS for a load-balanced service. In that case, you can monitor a web page on your primary server via our API and if the monitoring system reports the page becomes unresponsive, your software routine can automatically update the DNS records for the zone to change priority to the backup! That's an automatic failover system made possible by our API!