Monitoring service improvements
We’ve just rolled out some improvements to our monitoring service. All server products, including virtual servers, get access to our basic ping monitoring service, allowing you to receive SMS and email alerts if your server goes off-line. For £5/month you can add enhanced monitoring, which allows you to confirm that individual services such as a web server are working correctly. Customers of our Managed Hosting service not only get access to enhanced monitoring, but also get the benefit of having our staff respond to the alerts for them.
The new features are:
- Temporary silencing of alerts
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You can now silence alerts for a set period. This is handy if you’re doing maintenance, and don’t want to be constantly pestered by alerts, but also don’t want the risk of forgetting to turn the monitor back on again afterwards.
- Prowl notifications
- Improved email alerts
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The email alerts previously included the same dense text that we use for SMS alerts. The new style notifications are now more verbose, and include links for silencing the monitor, and in the case of web alerts, a link to the page that failed.
- Monitoring of arbitrary TCP ports
- We provide monitors for most common services, including HTTP, SMTP, IMAP and POP3. You can now also monitor any TCP port. This check simply confirms that the host is accepting connections on this port, and then closes the connection.
Prowl is a notification system for iOS, allowing you to receive alerts on an iPhone or iPad. The advantage of Prowl notifications over SMS is that they’re not limited to 141 characters, so we can include a more verbose message, including direct links for silencing the alert. They’re also delivered over the internet, rather than the mobile network, so will work if you have a wifi connection, but no mobile signal.
Support for an Android equivalent (such as Notify My Android) is on the to-do list.