Lets face it, we are in this business to provide a service and highest
level of uptime possible. We understand your website needs up as closest
to 100% as possible. We take downtime very seriously and will stive always
to prevent it. In an event there is downtime we offer our clients with
a basic level of server monitoring 24 hours a day 7 days a week all year
round. Even when you are sleeping rest assured your server is being watched.
Ping
Pinging a server is a first level of troubleshooting method
which will tell us if a server will respond when queried by
sending a packet. If the server is down or not responding it
will result with 100% packet loss as a reply. The latter doesn't
mean the websites are up necessarily. A server may be responding
but overloaded where websites or other services are not loading.
Note:
It is possible to disable ping test responses via firewalls,
routers, and/or server settings. Accordingly, not all servers
will response to Ping requests even if operational. Microsoft.com
is an example of site that has disabled Ping responses. It is
important you let us know if you disable ping on your server
to prevent uneeded monitoring at that level. Failure to do so
will result in uneeded troubleshooting or reboots on our end.
Dictionary definition:
A utility to determine whether a specific IP address is accessible.
It works by sending a packet to the specified address and waiting
for a reply. PING is used primarily to troubleshoot Internet
connections. There are many freeware and shareware Ping utilities
available for personal computers. Network - Ping - Server
Cool fact:
It is often believed that "Ping" is an abbreviation for Packet
Internet Groper, but Ping's author has stated that the names
comes from the sound that a sonar makes.
SSH
SSH is another first level test to check if a server is responding.
SSH lets us connect to the server remotely within the network
to gain access to the server via command line versus console.
If the server is not responding to SSH most of the times it
will mean it is offline or overloaded
Note:
If you have SSH disabled or listening on another port please
let us know so we can adjust our monitoring. Failure to do so
will result in uneeded troubleshooting or reboots on our end.
Dictionary definition:
Developed by SSH Communications Security Ltd., Secure Shell
is a program to log into another computer over a network, to
execute commands in a remote machine, and to move files from
one machine to another. It provides strong authentication and
secure communications over insecure channels. It is a replacement
for rlogin, rsh, rcp, and rdist. SSH protects a network from
attacks such as IP spoofing, IP source routing, and DNS spoofing.
An attacker who has managed to take over a network can only
force ssh to disconnect. He or she cannot play back the traffic
or hijack the connection when encryption is enabled. When using
ssh's slogin (instead of rlogin) the entire login session, including
transmission of password, is encrypted; therefore it is almost
impossible for an outsider to collect passwords. SSH is available
for Windows, Unix, Macintosh, and OS/2, and it also works with
RSA authentication.
