Site24x7 - Website Monitoring Service

The cascading effect of DNS failure

May 07 2010 03:13:11 AM Posted By : Arun
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A friend of mine recently had his website going down for a couple of hours. Since there was no prior communication from his web host regarding the downtime, he got frustrated and tried to contact them through email. To his utter dissatisfaction, his mail bounced with the below error message:

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software. 
A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error.
support@------.com  Domain Not Resolved
His website did come back up later on, but only after he made angry phone calls to the support team and vented his ire in online forums and Twitter. The entire downtime lasted close to 3 hours.

What happened in this case? The web host’s DNS server went down and it had a cascading sort of effect. It affected their mail services as well since they were hosting their own mail servers. Needless to say, this incident left a bad impression on their customer who is now looking out for a better provider.

This can happen to any hosting provider or organization. A failure of the DNS service can trigger a failure of the interconnected parts. Multiple services such as websites, mail servers, proxy servers, etc. can be affected. 

So if you are a web host, it is very important you become aware of DNS problems as soon as they arise so you can take immediate remedial action. A good DNS Monitoring service can obviously help in identifying any failure. The next logical step would be to keep your customers abreast of the situation so that they don't jump for your throat. Then, narrow down the problem as soon as you can and get it sorted out before it starts generating bad press for your business.

Mail server monitoring with Site24×7

Sep 27 2007 03:10:21 AM Posted By : Arun
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Author: Arun Most organizations today rely on their mail systems more than any other piece of infrastructure. Any failure of mail servers has the potential to cause havoc, and your helpdesk might be swamped with calls from angry users. What could be even worse is the possibility that you might not even know about this failure. It is therefore vital that mail servers are monitored continuously and any outages detected quickly and resolved. With the introduction of the 'Mail Server Monitor' type in our recent update, we aim to offer proactive mail server monitoring to users. The mail server monitor can continuously monitor the uptime and performance of your mail servers, both SMTP and POP. Any outages of both the incoming and outgoing mail servers will be detected quickly and instant email/SMS/RSS alerts will be sent. This will help you take quick action to resolve these outages. You can also configure thresholds for response time and get notified if the performance slows down. This helps in proactively identifying any performance bottlenecks before they snowball into a much serious problem. The mail server monitor also calculates the email round-trip time (RTT) of your mail server. This is done by sending an email to the mail server using SMTP and retrieving the same message using a POP account.

Mail server monitor

To get started, click the 'Monitor Mail Server' link inside your Site24x7 account. Setting up is easy and you should be able to configure a mail server monitor within a few seconds. What is your take on Site24x7's mail server monitor? Do try it out and let us know your feedback