One of the items that features very highly on the check list of a webmaster shopping for a web hosting company to host his site is reliability. In the hosting industry, reliability is measured in uptime, in other words, is you website always online when your customer visit ? Most web hosting companies promise that your site available to your site visitors 99% of this time meaning and uptime of 99%, but is this true? Some hosting companies go out of their way to try to persuade you that this is true by getting certification from a third party to confirm their 99% uptime claim.
Even the most well planned server network do experience downtime now and again. This is where a site monitoring service like Pingdom comes in. Pingdom.com, a site monitoring company, offers to monitor website, web servers, networks and other infrastructure and services associated with web hosting such as routers, switches including services running on servers such as email, FTP firewalls and other services. Pingdom notify you instantly should you site, server or any of the services your have requested Pingdom to monitor have any problem.
Some web hosting companies makes insert a clause that prohibits their customer from using site monitoring services like the one offered by pingdom.com, not because the hosting companies are worried they will be caught out on their uptime promise, but because the intermittent data packets sent to poll servers by site monitoring services to check availability of website adds to bandwidth usage and extra stress on the server.
According to Peter Alguacil of Pingdom.com, Pingdon.com do things differently to ensure there is barely noticeable additional traffic or stress on server “monitoring from Pingdom can use several different types of tests. The ones used for this survey are not ping checks but ICMP ping, which will only see if the server is alive, not if the web page is being delivered,
but instead HTTP checks, which download the HTML page (but only the HTML, no images or scripts are loaded, so the test is still very light on bandwidth)” Peter added that ” How often tests are performed is chosen by the user. The intervals we have are 1, 5, 15, 30 and 60 minutes” which means the users of Pingdom.com services can determine polling frequency.
Peter concluded by responding to the question raised about web hosting companies that terminates users account for using site monitoring services “If your hosting provider would ban you for using a monitoring solution like Pingdom, I suggest you talk to them. That is not a serious host in that case. The extra load really is minimal. We actually have lots of hosting companies as customers, so I know they like our service.”
Seven Deadly Web Hosting Error
Even if you do not sign up for pingdom.com ‘s website monitoring service, there are lots of useful information and tools you can use or play with on their website. One information in particular stands out more than the others, its the compilation of the seven most common server errors Pindom come across frequently, this sever errors, one or two of which every Internet users would have come across at one time or the one constitutes 97% of errors Pindom come across in their site monitoring duties.
Here is a list of three of the sever errors and the explanation of what the error means. You should visit this page on Pingdom’s website to find out the remaining four errors.
- 62.14% – Unable to connect to server
The connection attempt to the web server times out.
Possible reasons: Server is down or unreachable (which can be network related, or a firewall issue). Web server software is down or overloaded. - 9.71% – DNS lookup problem
The domain name of the website could not be resolved.
Possible reasons: Incorrect settings and/or configuration of the DNS servers for the domain name of the website. - 9.44% – Connection refused by server
The web server responds but refuses a connection.
Possible reasons: Overloaded web server or other internal server problem.