How it works

Several methods are used to try and test against downtime.

Ping

The most basic of downtime tests and what most network professionals will immediately do to try and test for downtime. The ping is simply a tiny bit of data sent to a server, when the server receives this it will respond, so if we don't receive a reply, then we know some thing may be wrong. Unlike a lot of our competitors though, we understand that a lot of you have special requirements. A lot of merchant banks require you to remove the ping facility from your server and some system administrators turn pinging off for various reasons. For these reasons we do not solely rely on ping requests for testing downtime.

HTTP calls

If we know we're checking against a web site we will try and grab a page from that site using HTTP calls. From this your web server will let us know whether it's still there, whether the page has been found and passed to us correctly or whether there's no page there at all (a 404 error). You can customise what information we send to you in emails and when we send it.

Server-side scripting

A huge amount of web sites on the Internet have a lot going on behind the scenes. Server-side scipting allows web authors to create dynamic and interactive content on their web sites and allows them to do much more with web forms and other rich content. With server-side scripting though, can often come problems. If there is an error in a server-side script it will often stop the entire web page from working and your users will just get error messages. We can scan your web pages for any errors generated by server-side scripts. Our systems are automatically configured to find error messages that are generated by default installations of server-side languages such as PHP and ASP. You can completely customise the system to search for specific errors if you wish.

And more...

We can't give away all of our secrets! Rest assured we are doing everything we can to make sure that you know your server or web site is offline as soon as possible.

Notifications

The best non-intrusive method of communication, in our opinion, is SMS and email. You can choose what triggers email or SMS notifications or turn them off all together. SMS messages are charged at £1 per message. Again, we'd like to reiterate that you only get sent an SMS message as and when you want, so if you only want email notifications this is a completely free service.

Register

Satisfied? If so, why not register for your free account? If you have any questions please feel free to contact us.