Uptime monitoring
February 8, 2016We all understand the critical importance of maintaining an online presence. The image above displays a live uptime report relating to sites hosted by Digital Tsunami.
On private clouds and dedicated web servers in the USA, China, Hong Kong and Australia, Digital Tsunami has been hosting websites since, well .. last century!
Over the last quarter, uptime has been 99.988%
Digital Tsunami uptime monitoring is implemented for all our hosted client sites. It is scheduled to ping the domains for an online file every 120 seconds. Immediate notification of any outages is received via an online dashboard (monitored on multiple devices by a Digital Tsunami support team member) and email. It will detect the briefest of outages, which may be for as little as two seconds.
No credible web host offers 100% uptime, even with the significant investment of co-location (a domain having multiple redundancies in multiple locations).
Hardware can fail. Comprehensive redundancy ensures that most components are duplicated to mitigate against individual failure having any impact. Should a small component (which is not duplicated) fail, emergency action is taken and replacement occurs usually within minutes.
Several years ago, an outage occurred when a big Australian telco technician managed to simultaneously crash all the connections to the datacentre AND the failover connections. Despite intense activity by our data centre support techs, this issue took several hours to resolve.
Infrequently (possibly once every two or three years), hardware must be upgraded. When this is necessary and downtime is absolutely unavoidable, a server may have to be down for a short time, in order to physically insert and reconnect new hardware. This is notified well in advance and conducted at a time which will result in minimal inconvenience to clients and their online customers.
However, in one year, even 99.9% uptime implies a potential 87 hours of downtime!
Digital Tsunami has implemented; and continues to review and research; every possible measure to minimise downtime, from all the physical and electronic security applied to the data centre, to all the hardware, firmware, software and procedural measures on our private clouds, to minimise exposure to risk.
DDoS attacks can also cause outages. While all major data centres have extreme redundancy to limit the effect of a DDoS attack, even massive online brands have suffered from these malicious targeted onslaughts.
However, monitoring tracks all outages, so also enables us to remind clients when they have forgotten to renew their own domain name registration! (Many clients entrust their host to manage their domain name registration and renewals to avoid responsibility for this issue).
While no host can guarantee 100% uptime, Digital Tsunami is constantly striving to maintain the highest possible percentage of uptime.
Read about Digital Tsunami web hosting and WordPress web hosting.
Read more about heartbeat monitoring.
From Our Clients
Foodbank has experienced unprecedented growth .. there is no doubt that the new Foodbank website, designed, built and maintained pro bono by Digital Tsunami, has been the principle tool in lifting Foodbank's profile. It is because our website is so engaging, that we have captured these donations. Foodbank just wouldn't be where we are today without Digital Tsunami.
We are all very happy with the new website and believe it captures the essence of the Group One brand.
Andrew and colleagues were able to assist at every step of the website production process, providing a sleek layout with high quality images. We would like to thank the Digital Tsunami team for an excellent job.
Since 2003, Digital Tsunami has collaborated with Personal Broadband Australia to deliver many online solutions, including the latest www.pba.com.au site.
Central to the development process is Digital Tsunami's thorough understanding of the project needs, clear and constant communication, and creative, innovative and meticulous approach to delivering solutions.
The results are clean, intuitive, refined and cohesive, with rapidly loading pages and extremely high usability.
The benefit to PBA of this long-term relationship has been the highly effective way in which Digital Tsunami has implemented and enhanced my vision on every project.
(We) took a fairly substantial audit of .. sophisticated sites both technically and creatively .. Out of six prominent designers, Digital Tsunami stood out.
The quality of the images, the sophisticated management of text .. together with smooth animations makes (our) website of very high calibre.
I would personally rate this site in the top 2 percent of world wide web sites today.
We are very pleased with the end result. It was good to have you pushing us along for material in order that we met the agreed completion deadline - you certainly are good project managers!