[eCenica]

Can you help us test our new Site Up or Down? – Website Status Checker

Please click on the link below, enter your domain name and click/tap Check. Then report back here and let us know if it works for you.

If you're wondering exactly what our domain checker does (and why it's different to a simple ping) please visit Site Up or Down? – Website Status Checker page and scroll down to How does your website checker work?

Thanks in advance!

^Rich

This post has been edited by eCenica: 30 December 2011 - 04:49 PM

[Sogo7]

Nice little gimmick but falls way short of of what others out there are doing such as,
http://montools.com/.../x10hosting.com and this example is pretty basic. I've even
seen some that even check the delivery times of email and SQL responces. As you can
imagine they are a real thorn in the side of some webhosts who don't want prospective
clients to know just how flaky their service really is. However I'm sure you would have no
such qualms about publishing your own servers uptime stats.

One problem that you may run into is that because the bandwidth allowance and web space are particulary small (especially the personal one) the server could may well throw up a resource limit hit error page and not the actual site however as the script gets a return ping it assumes the site is up and all is well.

This post has been edited by Sogo7: 30 December 2011 - 07:54 PM

[tomsel]

Genuine question, what would be the advantage of using your site over just pointing my browser at the website I wanted to check, or am I missing the point?

[Sogo7]

tomsel, on 30 December 2011 - 08:55 PM, said:

Genuine question, what would be the advantage of using your site over just pointing my browser at the website I wanted to check, or am I missing the point?

Nope, you hit it straight on the head.
It's a bit of web fluff that serves no purpose.

[Spitfire]

Actually, I've used services like that to help resolve quite a few regional DNS issues when setting up new domains. They're quite handy when you need to quickly check responses from visitors that aren't in the same location as yourself and you're stuck on a company network firing out though a local server.

[tomsel]

Spitfire, on 31 December 2011 - 01:09 AM, said:

Actually, I've used services like that to help resolve quite a few regional DNS issues when setting up new domains. They're quite handy when you need to quickly check responses from visitors that aren't in the same location as yourself and you're stuck on a company network firing out though a local server.

Actually in fairness that does sound quite useful. I can recall a few times seeing one of my sites online but others complaining it wasn't, so I guess a service such as this does have its uses.

[MikeChipshop]

eCenica, on 30 December 2011 - 04:40 PM, said:

Snip

Working fine for ups and downs.
Quite a nice implementation of the format too. Well done.

tomsel, on 30 December 2011 - 08:55 PM, said:

Genuine question, what would be the advantage of using your site over just pointing my browser at the website I wanted to check, or am I missing the point?

It's not to check if it's down for you, it's to check if it's down in general.

[eCenica]

MikeChipshop, on 31 December 2011 - 08:56 AM, said:

Working fine for ups and downs.
Quite a nice implementation of the format too. Well done.

It's not to check if it's down for you, it's to check if it's down in general.

Thanks for the feedback.

As MikeChipShop correctly says. The checker is designed to give users an independent way of verifying if a site is up or down.

Sometimes our users will contact us in a panic thinking their site is down, when in fact their site is online and working fine. After a bit of investigation we tend to find it's something simple like an over zealous firewall on their PC, or simply a problem with their web connection.

Our checker is designed to be just a quick, simple way of helping people isolate the problem.

Our script does not do a ping. So its smart enough to work out the difference between a server being online/offline and the web site status. For technically minded, we're using a Curl PHP request and then comparing the response codes. More details are available on the site.

This little app is just something we cobbled together in a couple of hours. We have lots of ideas to scale it up, so please keep your feedback coming!

Thanks again,

Rich

This post has been edited by eCenica: 04 January 2012 - 11:28 PM