Receive a Text Message when your site is down

[stugster]

Hey all,

I'm developing a really simple application that lets you receive a text message if (or when) your site goes offline.

The system checks your website every 2 minutes on port 80 (this is the port that you connect to to see your site online).

If it can't connect, it does another check in 2minutes time. If, for the second time, it still can't connect, it sends you a text message to the mobile phone number of your choice with the date and time.

I'm looking for a couple of beta testers who would like to trial this service over the months of December and January.

I need some accurate feedback from you (in the form of a questionnaire) at the end of January, so please only offer if you're willing to do this (there's only about 15 questions!)

Please send me a PM if interested, or fire a reply on here

 

[Interconnect IT]

Would it be more useful if you could do an http fetch as well, so as to confirm that not only is port 80 open, the DB and other scripts are working too?

 

[stugster]

It actually does fetch HTTP, does a regex for common PHP and SQL errors too

 

[Interconnect IT]

Aha - an important thing to measure. Does it confirm how long that page took to arrive and keep stats also? One common problem we have with a client server (not ours) is that it occassionally likes to have a rest. I had a go at the hosts and slowly but surely it all got better... but with no explanation from them. Without regular http fetches it would never have been spotted.

Happy to try it out on one of our sites, but have to say that now we have a new drive in it'll hopefully be a very boring period once more.

 

[stugster]

Hi mate,

It doesn't as yet calculate how long it took, nor keep a record.

The system is in the very early stages and at the moment is very simple. Obviously, over the next few months, these services could be introduced to better provide for the client.

I know you personally wouldn't, but would "you" pay for a service such as this?

 

[dave_n]

stu...it's a great idea particularly for mission critical apps.
Many moons ago Oracle Enterprise Manager had a paging system that did the same for DB's.

If you are going to test this then won't you have to take some sites down to ensure the text goes out?

 

[stugster]

I've got a few test sites that I can pull down, but it would be good to see just how a client's site would react.

A few people have PM'd me who have very negligible uptimes, so I'm quite confident they'll be rudely awakened at 3am with a text message

 

[Interconnect IT]

Hmmm - I do pay for Pingdom texts, so the answer is yes, I would

 

[Calibre Designs]

Sounds really interesting Stu.

 

[james_nic]

What would this service cost?

 

[stugster]

I'm not, as yet, certain on the costings, but as a rough estimate:

£10 a month would get you 50 Notifications via SMS everytime your site went down per month.

You would also receive unlimited email notifications.

If a site was down, and you were notified via SMS, you wouldn't be notified of any downtime again until the site came back up (maybe even a possibility of a notification of when the site comes back up too).

I believe £10 a month would be a fair price to pay for almost-instant SMS notification of your business website going down.

 

[tbow50]

I think it's a great idea, and £10 a month sounds good to me!

 

[streetslocal]

One would imagine its a very straight forward thing to put together if you need a very simple idea drop me a PM.
I have in fact done this myself with a clever short cut that costs me a few quid but i only pay if the site is down which is very very very rare.

 

[stugster]

Hi mate,

Yes, basic ping/icmp responses are easy to put together... but I feel that it's a bit limited.

The system I'd be looking at developing would also have a full history of previous downtime/uptime, and graphs to show the availability of your site over a given time, the latency of your site, and other useful things your own host may not be so willing to provide.

Having the ability to ensure the http request actually works, rather than pinging the port, and perhaps even going as far as checking the DB engine also works would be a bit more tricky.

 

[streetslocal]

Hi mate,

Yes, basic ping/icmp responses are easy to put together... but I feel that it's a bit limited.

The system I'd be looking at developing would also have a full history of previous downtime/uptime, and graphs to show the availability of your site over a given time, the latency of your site, and other useful things your own host may not be so willing to provide.

Having the ability to ensure the http request actually works, rather than pinging the port, and perhaps even going as far as checking the DB engine also works would be a bit more tricky.

Hosts are hopeless at providing these details.
I use a third party system that is free that monitors my site and provides historic reports etc,if the site goes down it goes straight to a specially set up email address that noone else uses.
That email address has a sms forwarding system on which activates with certain keywords and is sent via sms to me.
Much cheaper as i only pay for the occasional text.

 

[stugster]

The "third party system" you're talking about is the exact same system I'm talking about developing?

 

[stu54321]

I have considered using a service like this in the past, but never got any further with it. Its certainly a useful idea.

What would be even better if you could sell it to ISPs so we wouldn't have to tell them that sites they host have gone down!

Cheers

Stuart

 

[Dwebs-Ltd]

Why re-invent the wheel stugster.

Pingdom does an excellent job
$9.95 approx £7 per month (http://www.pingdom.com/)
5 Checks included - any of the types below
- HTTP / HTTPS (Can monitor page content for changes too)
- Ping ICMP
- TCP / UDP Checks
- DNS Check
- POP3 / SMTP / IMAP Checks
Check resolution every 1min

Extra 20 SMS $11.25 approx £7.55
Bulk discount on higher SMS purchases i.e. 50, 100, 200

Full downtime history it even does a full trace and ping when the check is reported as down to see if its a network issue etc.

Around 9-12 monitoring servers world wide
2x Dallas, TX (USA)
Amsterdam (Holland)
Vasteras (Sweden)
Berkeley, CA (USA)
Reading (UK)
Stockholm (Sweden)
Houston, TX (USA)
Montreal (Canada)

We use Pingdom to monitor all our services including managed clients. Never let us down yet and no false positives. We have best part of 60 checks on our account at the moment and its worth every penny.

 

[stugster]

By your logic then, your hosting company shouldn't exist

If OpenMind has a company that provides Hosting solutions, you've just reinvented the wheel.

 

[streetslocal]

The "third party system" you're talking about is the exact same system I'm talking about developing?

Mines free
And only pay for a text if the site is down

But im clued up on how to do it so to speak on the cheap

But a valuable service if you offer both as standard and people dont have great knowledge.

Rather than spending loads of time with the project why not have a white label system and then use the text system as i do??

You could set up a white label system with all of those functions within minutes

 

[stugster]

Mines free
And only pay for a text if the site is down

But im clued up on how to do it so to speak on the cheap

But a valuable service if you offer both as standard and people dont have great knowledge.

Rather than spending loads of time with the project why not have a white label system and then use the text system as i do??

You could set up a white label system with all of those functions within minutes

This is it mate

You have the knowledge and expertise to implement something like this for your own needs, but average Joe might not, or if he does, just doesn't want the hassle of having to set it up.

I believe that for a small fee, it's a reasonably useful service

 

[Dwebs-Ltd]

By your logic then, your hosting company shouldn't exist

If OpenMind has a company that provides Hosting solutions, you've just reinvented the wheel.

LOL stugster just trying to save you some valuable development time. Pingdom do a brilliant job and have been doing for years.

 

[stugster]

No need to save me any development time mate, if I'd wanted advice on whether or not I should waste time on development, I'd have asked.

My post had nothing to do with that

Sometimes a bit of work has to be done to create a viable business

 

[streetslocal]

This is it mate

You have the knowledge and expertise to implement something like this for your own needs, but average Joe might not, or if he does, just doesn't want the hassle of having to set it up.

I believe that for a small fee, it's a reasonably useful service

Go whitelabel.....
And offer a service for a £9.99 monthly fee with say a 30 day free trial and im sure you would be ok

 

[stugster]

LOL stugster just trying to save you some valuable development time. Pingdom do a brilliant job and have been doing for years.

In fact, that's not very bright logic... That's like saying Duane's wasted all his time developing Kashflow because Sage already exists!

Our survey says: EHHH OHHH!

 

[stugster]

Go whitelabel.....
And offer a service for a £9.99 monthly fee with say a 30 day free trial and im sure you would be ok

That's a great way of working I think! Not only are you inclined to get Joe Public signing up, but you're more likely to get web hosts, ISPs, and Larger corporations set up to use the facilities

Thanks mate

 

[kapow]

I have to ask the question... how are you planning to send the SMS?

If you don't have an ultra-reliable provider for these, and send via HTTP or a similar 'instant protocol' (not email) then the service is a little defunct anyway.

Also, you COULD in theory use Premium SMS to bill the recipients for the error messages, as an alternative to a monthly fee, but this probably wouldn't be very reliable as it requires routing messages directly over the recipients mobile networks (and delays are not uncommon within the UK MNO's themselves).

Additionally, you'll need more than 1 server / site to do the monitoring in case YOUR network is having problems... in which case it might think ALL your client sites are down, when in fact none of them are.

For a pre-paid service, I think about £10 a month is a fair price though.

A.

 

[stugster]

I have to ask the question... how are you planning to send the SMS?

I have a very reliable, previously tested, SMS provider who has POST via HTTP available. This service has been thoroughly tested and works

Also, you COULD in theory use Premium SMS to bill the recipients for the error messages, as an alternative to a monthly fee, but this probably wouldn't be very reliable as it requires routing messages directly over the recipients mobile networks (and delays are not uncommon within the UK MNO's themselves).

Also, premium numbers have a bad stigma in this country; and not many people trust them.

Additionally, you'll need more than 1 server / site to do the monitoring in case YOUR network is having problems... in which case it might think ALL your client sites are down, when in fact none of them are.

Yeah, that has been taken into consideration, and this will have to be carefully planned. Not only having it on one server, but as you rightly pointed out, across multiple ISPs to confirm it really is in fact the client's site that is offline.

Thanks for your feedback

 

[danw]

Hi Stuart, thought I'd wade in with my thoughts too. We also use another service (you've probably seen them already when checking out your competition) which I think we pay about £150 a year for.

The cost of SMS credits is neglible compared to knowing that the servers are up. We have a few servers being monitored and for example if a firewall failed then there are 2 people on call who get texts but with a couple of servers behind each firewall also being unreachable because the firewall is out it quickly eats up credits!

One question for you - how will you maintain the service if your servers go down? Like you've said it's easy to check a site is responding, but the clever bit is the confidence that your service is working ok (e.g. it doesn't have connection problems or DNS issues etc.). Just curious how you solve that?

If you introduced performance reporting too (i.e. time taken to retrieve page) that would be of interest. Let us know when you launch.

Good luck

 

[stugster]

Hi Dan,

The server performance is a serious issue, and one that would have to be properly planned. The service would be maintained by having it distributed over numerous servers hosted on numerous different ISPs around the world, thus, in the event a server of ours did go down, the rest of our network knew about it and another server instantly takes its place.

The easiest way to do this would probably to make use of the software in development itself, but in a clustered "star" topology format, where all the servers are constantly communicating with one another.

Having a cluster also opens the door to a "World Wide Average" and a "UK Average" for latency and other interesting statistics, too!

 

[HC-Martin]

Stu - stick with your plans mate. Sounds a good idea to me.

Don't go premium rate/reverse charge - that's a total PITA.

 

[edmondscommerce]

sounds like an interesting idea - good luck with it

which SMS provider are you planning on using out of interest..?