Need opinions about site monitoring

[technoczech]

After signing up for a hosting plan, I was experiencing some moments where my site would come back with "Page could not be displayed", for 2-4 minutes, and fairly frequently (at least once a day, during the day - not like middle of the night maintenance). After having some discussions with support and determining it wasn't a network issue, I started using a free site monitoring service to send me an email when they can't "see" a certain word on my home page, and while I'm not personally experiencing any more of the "not displayed" messages, I do get 1 email from the monitoring service every day or two at random times. The monitor polls the site every 2 minutes, so since I'm only getting one email at a time, it doesn't seem to last that long.

 

I was wondering:

1. What do you all use to monitor your sites?

2. Assuming there's nothing wrong with the monitoring service, I think that even though it's not much, it seems that this much unavailability is too much in the middle of the day. Is this normal/typical?

 

(It is a shared server; I'm planning to move to a private virtual server once I go live since I can't get a dedicated SSL on a shared server - correct?)

 

Thanks!

[RhinoFish]

1. Hyperspin (1-minute intervals), but there are many great alternatives to choose from.

2. Don't make that assumption yet, make sure your monitoring service isn't the problem first, because switching that is far easier than switching hosting. Hyperspin has redundant servers, meaning if one checking server detects downtime, it's confirmed by another at a separate location. Try a service that does that, to make sure it's your hosting, not your monitoring. Hyperspin has a free trial period, I think it's 30 days, sounds like a great way to use the free period. Once you've confirmed it's your host, find a new host. Short outages interrupt shopping nearly as much as longer outages, given the time that most people take to shop.

 

My hosting and monitoring at 1-minute intervals normally has 100% uptime for each month. Don't be satisfied with outages, I don't think they're acceptable no matter how cheap your hosting is (unless it'd free, then you get what you pay for).

[technoczech]

Thanks so much for the info. The Hyperspin monitoring seems like a good value so I'll probably sign up for that after I research just a little more. My hosting company is not dirt cheap, had great reviews online, has been very responsive, and they're willing to move me to a different server for free, so once I try out a more dependable monitoring service, if the problem continues, I'm thinking about trying a different server before giving up on them completely. Thanks also for the confirmation that downtime in any amount is not ok. I battle perfectionism and needed to make sure I wasn't being unreasonable.