Website Reliability

[Michael42]

Is there anything that can tell me if\when my web page or site is down?

 

[MaryYeager]

This might be be useful:

http://www.orangecomputers.cc/Overview_WebAlert.asp

Mary

 

[EdwardMartinIII]

Um, the age of your ISP?

If your site is going down so often that you need a notification, maybe you need a more reliable ISP.

surprised,
Edward

"Cut a hole in the door. Hang a flap. Criminy, why didn't I think of this earlier?!" -- inventor of the cat door

 

[Michael42]

EdwardMartinIII,

Thanks for the reply.

Actually you may be amazed at the downtime even some very well established sites experience. This site for example I have found experiences 1-10 outages a day!

I guess it comes down to how much downtime is acceptable. For some 90% uptime is OK, still others require 99.9999%.

Have you ever tried to show a demo of a web product worth thousands of dollars and you hit the 10% (or 5%) where it is down? This happened to me at a Fortune 100 company more than once!

I have found WebAlert very helpful. It tracks both sites and mission critical pages.

Maybe there are sites that have never had a critical page down and experience 100% uptime. Some of our pages are reliant on particular users to maintain and if they do not have to answer to any particular Software Configuration Management requirements their pages can and do have issues.

Take Care,

Michael42

 

[EdwardMartinIII]

Ah, dev-related stuff. Well, that's a good point, although dev should be done in a separate Dev environment, tested in a Test environment and then -- scheduled to not coincide with a demo -- released into Production and smack-tested.

Demo-ing dev work is a surer path to suicide than whiskey and PCP combined!

So, you use this to alert you during a demo of a problem (because I expect you do a complete ream-job test-and-a-half before you walk into a demo)?

Curious,
Edward

"Cut a hole in the door. Hang a flap. Criminy, why didn't I think of this earlier?!" -- inventor of the cat door

 

[Michael42]

>> Demo-ing dev work is a surer path to suicide than whiskey and PCP combined!

I completely agree with your other observations.

I can see you are also aware working for Fortune 200 companies is many times not an excercise in best practices but an adventure in what a VP wants this week.