I have noticed this site being unavailable a few times, so I am unable to access it to manage stuff or write new stuff. It is happening often enough for me to now consider it an ongoing problem rather than a one-off incident, although the downtime only seems to last for short periods – less than 10 minutes.
I have asked the host’s tech support to look into it.
Obviously I only know about downtime that occurs when I am trying to access the site and that is not all the time and I have no idea whether it is happening much at other times.
If you find this site unavailable at any time, can you let me know so I can get a better idea of the scale of the problem? E-mail to andrew [at] skuds.co.uk would be fine, even if for obvious reasons it will not be received straight away.
I can monitor my outage a bit by use of my site stats. I have two different counters, one for the front page and one for everything else. Obviously, the front page is going to be spasmodic, anyway, but the ‘everything else’ is fairly constant throughout the day, mainly with google searches for long-removed pictures of David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo, so if there is a gap in the site stats it might be because sitemeter is down but is more likely that the blog is down
I thought about doing that but there are two difficulties.
One is that traffic here is not that high. No hits for 15 minutes could easily be explained by there being no visitors for that time.
The other is that the code for statcounter can also be registered from a chached copy of a page – either locally to someone’s PC or on a Google/Yahoo cache of the site. If the site was down and someone viewed a copy saved in a chache, or manually it would register as a visit.
You were down at 0934, then back up when I checked again 9mins later.
I’ve used the Montastic website monitoring site for a while, and it seems to work quite well. They say they check every 10mins minimum, so it’s no good for server reboots but detects longer outages.
Nice one. I will set that up later on. Thanks for the tip.
Supanames have a track record of restarting their web servers, disrupting all sites using them every time. There are complaints about this on the web going back for at least 6 years, and it seems to be getting worse. At various times they seem to have had automatic scheduled tasks to do this every half hour, hour, whatever.
This is very easy for them to do and ‘sorts out’ any problems on their servers. However it is an absolute killer for any serious web sites, especially those with interaction, which is a large and increasing number these days.
Supanames seems to be on its way to being the online version of Woolworths – a ‘pile em high, sell em cheap’ vendor that is stuck in a time-warp while the online world is moving on in service needs. My prediction is that unless they get their act together pretty fast they are on a slippery slope to becoming yesterday’s news.
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