Earlier on the blog, I wrote to you about having backup software. I compared having backup software to having car insurance. You never know you need it until you actually need it. Does that make sense? I hope that last line wasn’t too confusing. Well, I have another question for you to start this article.

 

Do you currently have any monitoring software for your server?

 

Now, depending on where you host your website or rent your server from, the host may provide a basic type of monitoring software. For example, if you purchased a dedicated server, Virtual Private Server(VPS), Cloud Server etc. from us, Turnkey Internet, your server will be automatically be setup on a basic ping monitoring software. This works off using ICMP which is a basic protocol used across the industry to monitor servers. I won’t get too off-base with this post, so you can read more about ICMP at the link below:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Control_Message_Protocol

 

Now, you may be asking, “what if I bought a reseller or basic hosting account? Is that only ping monitored?” In our system, all our reseller and hosting servers have another level of monitoring attached to them. This includes ping monitoring, memory monitoring, drive space monitoring, snmp monitoring, and bandwidth monitoring to just name a few. We also can setup content checks. That means we can setup a monitor that will look if a site contains a word or piece of text. If it doesn’t find the word, the server will alarm for us.

 

You may be asking why? Why write an article on monitoring software? Well my friends, in slaying tickets each week, I come across many different issues across different clients. Some of these issues could have been prevented and others would have had a smaller impact if preventative measures were taken. Let me give you an example to really drive this one home.

 

Let’s say you have a website named, jeremysdomain.com and purchased it directly from Turnkey Internet with a dedicated server.  Your site will be used to as a life force for your business. You will take orders online. You place promotions online among other items. Next thing you know, you go to your site and it doesn’t load. In fact, it just times out completely.

 

You can still ping your server, but your site is fully off-line. You open a ticket with the helpdesk and they inform you that your server is overloaded due to a large spike in bandwidth. This resulted in your server running low on memory and your server crashing. The engineers fix the issue and inform you that you may want to consider some monitor software that will constantly check to see if your server is having issues other than a failed ping.  The entire process takes about an hour to get the server back online.

 

Let’s look at the situation with monitoring software. You start a promotion on your website. As your promotion gets into full swing, you receive an email notification stating that your server is alarming for multiple items. The engineers inform you that your bandwidth is beginning to max on the server which results in your server running low on memory. The engineers schedule a time with you to take the server offline and increase the memory in the server. Your site is down 15 minutes for the upgrade and back online within minutes. Your promotion never skips a beat and your customers never even notice the issue.

 

If having backup software for your server is like having insurance on your car, then monitoring software would be like having a super, upgraded alarm system in your car that checks your oil level, your tire pressure, your electrical components in your car among many other tiems

 

Do you have monitoring software? If not, go to http://turnkeymonitoring.com/ and you can see some of options available to you.

 

Until next time Turnkey Lovers…

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