Website hosting....dropouts etc

[aim54x]

Hey I just wanted an opinion on this matter.

I have been using my web hosting a lot more recently and have noticed that I have been experiencing service dropout and disruptions alarmingly frequently. I have been reporting these to my host but am always replied with an email stating that everything is working fine when they checked it. I feel that this is not really addressing my problem.

Just this morning I wrote:

Just wanted to report that I could not access my site at all for about 15 minutes

FileZilla gave me - Connection attempt failed with "ECONNREFUSED - Connection refused by server".
Firefox 3 - could not connect to host

and got this back

The web site provided by you is working absolutely fine. As well FTP services for the account are working absolutely fine. Please check the same at your end and confirm.

I have sent this

Service has resumed, any ideas why I am constantly having black out periods??

I am with 3ix, and have a 3yr contract so I have another 2.5yrs to go. This is not the first email that I have sent on the matter.

Cheers
Cameron

[biggerry]

The first thing that comes to mind is that you need a monitoring solution to determine how often your webbie is actually up, I have, in the past used nagios http://www.nagios.org/, which is a opensource product you can install on a linux server which basically checks all forms of services on different hosts, ie. check http traffic every 15 minutes (or whatever interval) or check pop3 mail response every hour. Now, nagios is something you would only use if you had good access to your host, probably not that suitable for your personal webbie remotely hosted

However there are services out there (free ones too) that will do this for you, a couple that advertise free services..

http://pingability.com/

http://basicstate.com/

At least if you can prove that your provider is not giving you decent uptime rates you can have a leg to stand on when you email support....

Also read up on their terms and conditions to see if they have a minimum guaranteed uptime - a decent host probably should have some form of stats for this.

hth

gerry