Problem with Frequent Short-Lived Downtime Events
Most of our customers don't experience frequent short-lived downtime events like this, however a few customers do. We have always taken issues like this very seriously and have done a lot of research to understand why some customers experience this type of thing. What we have found is that this downtime is definitely really happening to these customers' servers and websites and this downtime is generally caused by unreliable website or server application hosting environments.
Shared Hosting environments are notorious for these types of frequent short-lived downtime events. In a Shared Hosting environment, your hosting company will put your website or server application on the same physical server that about 200 other websites and applications are running on. (The same goes for shared database servers) This is a very vulnerable environment because if any of those other sites hog up server resources for even a minute or two, your site will experience problems. Shared Hosting environments are also problematic because any one of those shared hosting customers can call the hosting company at any time and ask them to do something to the server that may require a short period of server down time (like a server reboot). Now just imagine that each of those 200 hosting customers called the hosting company once every 90 days to have the hosting company do something like this to the server. This would result in an average of 2 short-lived downtime events per day.
One important thing to note is that AlertBot's systems are very fault tolerant and are designed to completely eliminate false downtime alerts. Before any alert is ever sent out, our systems always verify your server's downtime issue from two geographically different locations. See the related article below for details how our systems eliminate the possibility of false alerts.
Some of our monitoring customers realize that these frequent short-lived downtime events are happening but do not want to be bothered by alerts for them. What we recommend these customers do is change their Alert Contact setting for those monitors so the first alert is sent out at 5 minutes after the failure is detected. ... this way if the downtime is only a short-lived event, then they will not be bothered with it, but if it is a longer event, they will be alerted.
Related Links
How Does AlertBot Eliminate False Alerts?
Shared Hosting environments are notorious for these types of frequent short-lived downtime events. In a Shared Hosting environment, your hosting company will put your website or server application on the same physical server that about 200 other websites and applications are running on. (The same goes for shared database servers) This is a very vulnerable environment because if any of those other sites hog up server resources for even a minute or two, your site will experience problems. Shared Hosting environments are also problematic because any one of those shared hosting customers can call the hosting company at any time and ask them to do something to the server that may require a short period of server down time (like a server reboot). Now just imagine that each of those 200 hosting customers called the hosting company once every 90 days to have the hosting company do something like this to the server. This would result in an average of 2 short-lived downtime events per day.
One important thing to note is that AlertBot's systems are very fault tolerant and are designed to completely eliminate false downtime alerts. Before any alert is ever sent out, our systems always verify your server's downtime issue from two geographically different locations. See the related article below for details how our systems eliminate the possibility of false alerts.
Some of our monitoring customers realize that these frequent short-lived downtime events are happening but do not want to be bothered by alerts for them. What we recommend these customers do is change their Alert Contact setting for those monitors so the first alert is sent out at 5 minutes after the failure is detected. ... this way if the downtime is only a short-lived event, then they will not be bothered with it, but if it is a longer event, they will be alerted.
Related Links
How Does AlertBot Eliminate False Alerts?
Updated on: 10/10/2022
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