[stocktrader]

On 11/25/2010 I noticed that my site was down. I immediately submitted a ticket. The time was 00:39. My site stayed down for 10 minutes before it came back up. After it came back up, I canceled the ticket.

I was then curious to see how long my site was down so I went into my logs and looked at the time it went down. It showed (see below) that my site had no activity for about 1 hour and 44 minutes.

173.77.67.187 - - [24/Nov/2010:23:04:45 -0500] "[edited]"
24.33.150.247 - - [25/Nov/2010:00:48:12 -0500] "[edited]"

My site is busy enough so that it wouldn't go too long without some kind of activity. So this leads me to believe it was down for quite a while. But on Pingdom's page which monitors MDD's servers it shows no downtime (even for the 10 minutes which I witnessed).

So my question is whether the Pingdom service is an accurate barometer of site downtime? I think I remember an earlier post on this forum (which I couldn't find) where someone experienced some downtime but Mike (maybe) replied that it wasn't MDD's server that was down but someone else on the internet chain (I think it might have been some random hardware problem by a 3rd party).

[MikeDVB]

Well I can tell you what happened - there is a cPanel bug that caused secondary IP addresses to become unbound on the server during a cPanel update. We actually opened a critical ticket with cPanel as well as opening a thread on their forums.

Our internal and external monitoring only monitor the primary server IP so they didn't pick up on this issue however a few clients did open tickets which caused us to look into it and bring everything back online as soon as we did so.

Only some clients were offline, a majority of the clients on the server were unaffected as only a few IPs didn't properly re-bind during the update.

You can review the thread on the cPanel forums if you wish at http://forums.cpanel...ing-175271.html

[stocktrader]

Is there any reliable measure of how often a site is down? It seems that monitoring services/pings/system checks (or whatever) only take a snapshot of the traffic process at a particular point along the internet chain.

[MikeDVB]

stocktrader, on 04 December 2010 - 04:23 AM, said:

Is there any reliable measure of how often a site is down? It seems that monitoring services/pings/system checks (or whatever) only take a snapshot of the traffic process at a particular point along the internet chain.

Monitoring services and pings are the best way - if the site won't load for you then a check for that site won't work either. Ultimately I'd suggest sighing up for a free Pingdom account if you want to watch the uptime of your specific domain