Email alert to resellers if server fails/is restored from backup

[Rosie M. Banks]

I'm just a newbie seller, so this was no big deal in comparison to how it might have been. But I just created a site for a customer on Tuesday, submitted it to search engines on Wednesday, and generally began publicizing the dang thing on Friday. On Friday night Hornet had its meltdown.

The backup used to restore Hornet apparently came from Monday, so the site I just created completely disappeared from the face of the earth -- and I didn't know about it until today (Saturday) when I attempted to show it to a potential client. Talk about awkward.

If I'd received a notification email that Hornet had fallen apart, I would've been ready when the server came back online. I would've put the site back with my backups ASAP. And I wouldn't have lost my potential client.

Note: in all the sites I've got hosted with Hostgator, I've never experienced this kind of problem before. Hostgator has always given me incredible service. And a disk failure like this is rare, I know.

But I would have REALLY preferred not finding out the hard way. A notification email in such situations would be a kindness for which I would be most grateful.

[slapshotw]

Rosie,

Without making excuses for them not emailing you, have you considered an offsite server monitoring service that can alert you when the server is down (and possibly give you the idea to check up on the network status)?

I use pingdom.com. There's lots of choices (some for cheaper than pingdom) if you search the forum here.

[Rosie M. Banks]

Thanks, Slapshot. I used to use a free pinging service but discontinued it because I got so many false positives -- and in one case, they failed to notice when a site was down. Probably the paid services provide better coverage.

But I still think this should be something HostGator could do. One day I hope to have loads of customers, and I'd prefer to be the one to alert my clients to server problems -- not the other way around.

[slapshotw]

Originally Posted by Rosie M. Banks

But I still think this should be something HostGator could do.

Sure--but part of both my personal site status and backup policies is that they are most effective if they have as little to do with Hostgator (and servers in Texas) as possible. This just makes them more effective.

[txitcs]

What I used to do was have a seperate account, from a different host out of a different data center, and setup a crontab that ran every 15 minutes checking the status of the server. I think I was paying $4.95 for the account.

If it fails, you can have it email you, and even your cell phone. This way you know almost instantly.