Frequently Asked Questions
If your question isn’t answered here, feel free to contact us.
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How does Monitor Server Uptime work?
We monitor your website or server from 20 different locations around the world. If a monitoring point detects your website is offline we double-check across the monitoring network. If your site is confirmed as offline we’ll send you an instant downtime alert by email, SMS or RSS.
The entire process happens within a few seconds, so if there’s a problem with your site you’ll be the first to know.
How frequently will you check my website?
You can choose to monitor a site every 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 or 15 minutes. Most web businesses using Monitor Server Uptime choose either 1 minute or 5 minute monitoring intervals.
How many alerts will I receive from Monitor Server Uptime?
For each period of server downtime we’ll send you two alerts – once when your website or server goes offline and another when your site is online again.
How do I receive alerts?
You can get your downtime and uptime alerts by email, RSS web feed or SMS text message to any where in the world. We’ll also be introducing alerts by Twitter DM soon.
Which email address should I use to receive alerts?
We recommend using at least one email address that’s not hosted on your site (a GMail or yahoo.com address, for example). That way, even if your mail server fails you can still receive our downtime and uptime alerts.
How many websites / servers can I monitor?
You can monitor as many websites or servers as you like.
Can I get regular uptime reports?
Yes, you can choose any combination of daily, weekly and monthly uptime reports. There’s also a complete monitoring archive available within your control panel.
How do you decide if a website or server is down?
Web servers are considered offline when any of the following is reported by more than three locations on our monitoring networks:
- Server cannot be connected to via the internet
- Web server is not responding on port 80
- Web server is running but is either not responding to requests or is returning invalid HTTP responses
Ping tests fails if:
- Server cannot be connected to via the internet
- Multiple Ping requests time out
TCP port tests fail when:
- Server cannot be connected to via the internet
- Server cannot be connected to via the port specified
Website tests (monitoring for specific pages or keywords) fails if:
- The URL inaccessible via the internet
- Page cannot be accessed using the specified username and password (if monitoring a password-protected area)
- The Required keywords do not appear in the page (if using keyword monitoring)
- The Excluded keywords do appear in the page (if using keyword monitoring)
How do I know if Monitor Server Uptime is monitoring my website / server?
For web server tests and website uptime tests your web server log will show my.monitorserveruptime.com as a referer.
For other tests you’ll need to check your router logs.
How much bandwidth does your system use?
Our server monitoring system uses a tiny amount of bandwidth because for website and server tests we only retrieve the page header. This means even monitoring your server every minute of every day for a month will only use around 20MB of bandwidth, which is less than the average size of one graphic on most websites.
Which locations / IP addresses does your monitoring system use?
Here’s a list of our monitoring network by location and IP address.
Seattle, USA 216.176.179.82
San Jose, USA 69.22.166.25
Ashburn, Virginia, USA 74.200.95.42
Chicago, Illinois, USA 74.200.92.42
Secaucus, New Jersey, USA 204.14.88.163
Montreal, Quebec, Canada 72.55.164.246
Maidenhead, Berkshire, UK 85.234.152.91
Roubaix, France 94.23.240.44
Amsterdam, Netherlands 83.149.104.60
Madrid, Spain 77.240.118.10
Milan, Italy 78.159.196.25
Frankfurt, Hesse, Germany 212.95.32.114
Singapore 203.211.130.204
Zhongzheng, Taipei, Taiwan 219.84.160.129
Neihu, Taipei, Taiwan 202.168.198.9
Istanbul, Turkey 85.153.34.60
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia 203.31.191.5
Why have I received an alert that says unknown host when I’m still able to access my website / server?
This error means there’s something wrong with your DNS servers – they may be down or experiencing connectivity problems. If your system or browser is uses cached DNS records you may not see the error yourself for a while.
However, our system performs a new DNS query for each check from each of our multiple monitoring locations – meaning you’ll be alerted to DNS errors and downtime immediately.
How do I setup monitoring for PHP, ASP, JSP or ColdFusion pages?
Most website monitoring services only tell you when the server is down but sometimes your web server may be working correctly but the scripting engine running your dynamic pages may be experiencing problems.
To setup this type of monitoring go to Monitoring > Add a Test then choose Monitor a Website. Enter the URL of the dynamic page you want to monitor and under Required Keywords enter some text that should appear on the page when the page is displaying correctly. There’s also the option of sending data by POST your dynamic page requires it.
Remember, the page used for this text doesn’t have to be publicly viewable page, if you prefer you can create a simple dynamic page that outputs a single keyword when the scripting engine is working correctly.
Can I monitor password-protected areas of my website?
Yes, we can monitor password-protected areas which use both HTTP authentication and form-based authentication.
If you’re a non-technical person or not a web developer you may find setting up this of monitoring a little tricky. In which case, feel free to contact us and we’ll help you get set up.
My hosting company has planned maintenance downtime – how do I pause monitoring so I don’t get an alert?
The Maintenance tab in your control panel has options to deactivate monitoring for Recurring Maintenance and One-Time Maintenance periods.
You can also select the deactivate monitoring option for any server test you have setup.
How do I send an automatic server reboot request to my web hosting company when my server goes offline?
Click Add New Notification Template under Contacts > Notification Template
Change the from email address, subject line and message as needed. Make sure the message includes everything your hosting company needs to know in order to reboot your server – server name / ID, IP address, etc.
Give the notification template the title Reboot Request and save.
Go to Contacts > Add New Email Contact and enter the email for your web hosting company.
We recommend:
- Disabling the UP notification since you only need to send a reboot request on if the server goes DOWN
- Setting the Notify after X consecutive errors option so that reboot requests aren’t sent for very short downtimes.
Be sure to set Reboot Request as the Notification Template before saving the Contact.
How can I prevent my analytics programs from counting monitoring as extra hits?
Most web analytics programs like Webalizer, Urchin and AWStats have filters to exclude hits based on referer URL. The refering URL of Monitor Server Uptime always starts with my.monitorserveruptime.com.
If you’re using a Javascript-based web stats program like Google Analytics or StatCounter no extra hits will be generated by our monitoring service.
Your downtime report is different from what my web hosting company is telling me. Why?
There are two reasons why this can be the case.
- Your web hosting company is almost certainly only reporting server downtime detected from within the datacenter but the reports and alerts we generate are confirmed by our global monitoring network
- Most web hosts only report unscheduled downtime, while Monitor Server Uptime reports all downtime
Why is my website / server marked as “restricted”?
Restricted servers are those that have already been used during the free 14-day trial period. To continue monitoring a website or server marked as restricted please begin a paid monitoring account.