x10Hosting Server Monitor (created by Piotr GRD)

[Piotr GRD]

This is not exactly "Off Topic", I would rather see it in ie. "Useful Information", but as there are only topics started by staff... If admins or moderators will decide that this topic will better fit into different forum section for better exposure - please, move.


Hello everyone. : )


Admins has been informed some time ago already and now I would like to announce it to all x10Hosting users.

x10Hosting Server Monitor (created by Piotr GRD)

This is the service that monitors accessibility to x10Hosting servers and display the results of it for every interested person.

Servers are monitored every 2 minutes, almost 24/7, in several various aspects like availability and time of responce on port 80 through HTTP, on port 21 through FTP, on port 2082 access to cPanel login page on servers with users accounts, additionally also availability of x10Hosting main page, forums and nameservers.

Results of the monitoring are updated "live" every 2 minutes and displayed in human friendly form of coloured time graphs that represents 24 hours of servers accessibility - last 24 hours on main page of the service and every day results when monitoring has been running after navigating through archives menu.

Service can be found under URL:
http://grd.net.pl/x10hosting/monitor/
Bookmark or add to favourites to not forget.

It's free to use for everyone, no need to login, register or anything.
I hope this will be as much useful as possible utility for everyone and will help to clear all doubts when one have problems (or not) accessing x10Hosting servers and don't know if it's something on his/her or on x10Hosting side. Additionally you can control how the servers worked when you were not online to check it by yourself. And if all the graphs will be continuously green - the admins will have something to be proud about. ; )


Piotr GRD


2010-11-01



Currently only servers with free accounts are monitored, but if you're a premium hosting user and you would like me to monitor the premium server - contact me through email provided in the footer of the page with my Server Monitor with subject line "x10Hosting Server Monitor". Thank you.

 

[Smith6612]

Now that, is what I call a detailed monitor!

 

[ChatIndia]

nice service!

 

[themvrules74]

Very detailed indeed. Now I don't have to report every error I get, when I know everybody gets them...

 

[callumacrae]

Corey does NOT like these XD

I must admit though, it is nice

~Callum

EDIT: Just noticed that you say you've informed admins, which admins? :/

 

[Piotr GRD]

Corey does NOT like these XD

I must admit though, it is nice

~Callum

EDIT: Just noticed that you say you've informed admins, which admins? :/

As I did not found any possibility to contact Corey directly (no email address found except abuse one, no possibility to send email to him through forums interface and I could not send PMs to anyone having not enough posts in here) I've sent emails through forums interface to Brandon and Bryon, I've asked them for any comments, concerns or are they have anything against it or not, and I've asked them to forward my messages to Corey. I didn't get any reply that they have anything against existence of it or making it public except one message from Bryon about not listing publicly the servers hostnames, so follwing that request I've removed the hostnames leaving only well known names like "Boru, Chopin" etc. and I've asked if there is anything more that they have to tell me about. Since my first message was sent at October 19th - I think I gave enough time to reply me back that they do not want it to exist and/or being publicly available.


I do monitor 18 shared webhosts currently and I hope that my utility will be useful for their users, but I always ask the admins before announcing it publicly.


-----------------------------------

Thank you for kind words about the service, everyone. : )

 

[callumacrae]

Okay, no problem then, I guess

~Callum

 

[Derek]

I don't think Corey likes these at all.

 

[Piotr GRD]

In my latest message to Bryon and Brandon I did even inform when exactly I will announce it publicly. And I've asked them to forward my messages to Corey. So one short message from them "no, don't publish it" would be enough from their side, I didn't get any, so I assume they don't have anything against it.

Besides - my utility don't show anything new, all the people posting in the free hosting support section do know what's up with the servers anyway. ; )

Maybe monitor of servers with premium accounts, if these are much more stable, would encourage more people to pay for premium?... But I have difficulties with identify these servers. If someone want to help me with this, please, contact me, my email is in the footer of my pages with monitoring results. : )

 

[ChatIndia]

he is presenting the truth. he is not spreading any deceitful and false information to put x10hosting down. What's the problem in such thing. It will help members to know for how much time and in what time their site is down. This will help them to determine the loss and act accordingly.

 

[galaxyAbstractor]

he is presenting the truth. he is not spreading any deceitful and false information to put x10hosting down. What's the problem in such thing. It will help members to know for how much time and in what time their site is down. This will help them to determine the loss and act accordingly.

Well, there is an issue that if we change something but the site owner has forgotten/bored of his service, or something else happens, the site can start showing that all servers are down constantly. Then people could assume that the monitor is official and skip x10 because the site said everything is offline

 

[Piotr GRD]

Well, there is an issue that if we change something but the site owner has forgotten/bored of his service, (...)

I did start monitor first webhost in September 2009, more than a year ago, and I'm still monitoring it and update when IPs are changing etc. and that first my monitor has already good opinion of that webhost users.

Currently I am monitoring 18 various webhosts (dosens servers in total). If I'll ever "get bored" or whatever else, I'll rather turn off the monitoring server and pages with results will show white "no data".

Besides there is a note that it's for guidance only and I don't guarantee 100% reliability, however after more than a year of experience I can say that it can be used for more than for guidance (at own risk of the visitor). Really, being reliable and useful for the internet community are my priorities.

And one more - why do you already assume that I will not update my service if x10Hosting will change something when I just started my monitoring of it? ; ) I am slowly but continuously improving my service that it becomes more and more automatic, so in the future even IPs changes etc. will be detected automatically. I need that improvements in my system and I need it being reliable as I would like to offer the monitoring of dosens webhosts for their users. If I'm beside the computer and I spot that one of the servers is offline or slow - I am always trying to manually test it from various other locations, servers in NL, US, CA, DE. And if anything goes wrong and I won't spot it by myself - one email to me should be enough, I usually reply within several hours, guarantee is within 48 if I'm out of computer for some reason, I'm serious person.

I really hope it will be as much useful as possible, I'm always happy if I can see that people do use my utilities, this gives me feeling that at least part of my time is not wasted.

 

[galaxyAbstractor]

I did start monitor first webhost in September 2009, more than a year ago, and I'm still monitoring it and update when IPs are changing etc. and that first my monitor has already good opinion of that webhost users.

Currently I am monitoring 18 various webhosts (dosens servers in total). If I'll ever "get bored" or whatever else, I'll rather turn off the monitoring server and pages with results will show white "no data".

Besides there is a note that it's for guidance only and I don't guarantee 100% reliability, however after more than a year of experience I can say that it can be used for more than for guidance (at own risk of the visitor). Really, being reliable and useful for the internet community are my priorities.

And one more - why do you already assume that I will not update my service if x10Hosting will change something when I just started my monitoring of it? ; ) I am slowly but continuously improving my service that it becomes more and more automatic, so in the future even IPs changes etc. will be detected automatically. I need that improvements in my system and I need it being reliable as I would like to offer the monitoring of dosens webhosts for their users. If I'm beside the computer and I spot that one of the servers is offline or slow - I am always trying to manually test it from various other locations, servers in NL, US, CA, DE. And if anything goes wrong and I won't spot it by myself - one email to me should be enough, I usually reply within several hours, guarantee is within 48 if I'm out of computer for some reason, I'm serious person.

I really hope it will be as much useful as possible, I'm always happy if I can see that people do use my utilities, this gives me feeling that at least part of my time is not wasted.

I didn't assume you would, but the others before you did get bored of them

 

[edentech]

nice 1

 

[callumacrae]

Okay, the reason Corey doesn't like them is because they list the addresses (can be attacked) and they list the names of the paid servers.

As long as they don't list the paid servers or the addresses, I'm guessing you're okay.

I like your one though, how often does it ask the server?

~Callum

 

[Piotr GRD]

Woldn't it be good advertisement to show 100% uptime of paid/premium servers? Even without listing their hostnames or IP addresses, just some well known for users names like these free "Boru, Chopin" etc.


I check the servers every 2 minutes. So every single line on the graph represents one check, 720 px / 720 checks per 24 hours. I think it's reasonable compromise between too low frequency (so we could miss something important) and too high frequency (that would use too much resources - mainly on monitoring server side, on the monitored servers side it's practically unnoticeable).

 

[callumacrae]

Two minutes is probably okay

Not many people know the names of the paid servers - even I only know one (because I was on it). Sure, it would be good advertising but it would not be good to get attacked

~Callum

 

[gebrelle]

Human friendly. Thats great

---------- Post added at 07:17 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:10 PM ----------

Yikes! Glad I'm on Chopin and not Starka. That would get annooying.

 

[leafypiggy]

he is presenting the truth. he is not spreading any deceitful and false information to put x10hosting down. What's the problem in such thing. It will help members to know for how much time and in what time their site is down. This will help them to determine the loss and act accordingly.

Not necessarily. Services like these simply ping port 'x' to see if the socket connection goes through - completely useless for determining if something is actually up. There are numerous things that could have gone wrong causing the server listening at port 'x' to not accept socket connections. For example, DDoS, lag (the socket must receive a response from the server, if the server's lagging, the script on the remote server will time out), and most importantly (though i'm not sure it's an issue anymore due to Remote MySQL) MySQL failure. Scripts in the past have always shown MySQL as down even when it's up - due to the fact that the MySQL server only accepts connections from local IP's, therefore if I tried to ping, for example, Chopin's server using PHP from a remote server, it would always show as offline, since it always rejects those requests.

The only way to determine absolutely whether or not a particular service is "offline" or "online" is to connect to the server via SSH, and check the status of the server using Shell.

 

[Piotr GRD]

(...) Services like these simply ping port 'x' to see if the socket connection goes through (...)

Unlike these other most common "monitors" that simply ping the servers - I do it in different way.

For "HTTP" - I'm actually sending a HTTP request and I am checking if the valid HTTP respond is sent.
For "FTP" - I'm trying to actually login with INcorrect username (while having no valid login credentials to each server) and empty password - if I receive "530 Login Authentication Failed" then I assume FTP works.
For "cPanel" I am sending HTTP request and I'm checking if valid cPanel login page is sent to me.
For x10Hosting main page and forums - the same, I am sending HTTP requests and I am checking if I receive valid pages.
For nameservers - I am asking for "A" records for x10hosting.com domain name and checking if such record is sent to me.

As for MySQL - I do not monitor it here, I do know that usually MySQL servers do not accept external connections. I do monitor MySQL on some other hosts only where I do have my own testing accounts and for this purpose I have installed a working PHP and MySQL powered scripts - by sending HTTP requests for these testing scripts installed I do know if MySQL work or not.


But yes, you're right about majority of such home made status scripts, very often just copy-pasted.