Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, and columnist. He writes the weekly Backspin and Gearhead columns in Network World (http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/gibbs.html).

Today's focus: Free server monitoring

By Mark Gibbs

"Free" is not always good, as it is often tied to things that have flaws or "gotchas." But when free gets you something useful without gotchas, then free is excellent.

Such is the case with Uptime, a service developed and offered for free by ArsDigita (http://www.arsdigita.com/)

Uptime is simple. You create a file that contains the word "success" and store it on your Web server. You then provide the URL of that file to Uptime, along with an e-mail address that should be notified when your server becomes unavailable.

You can select to be notified for "down" and "up" events, or to be notified every so many hours following a "down" event (the latter scheme is useful for pager notification).

Uptime also creates a log page that you can elect to keep password-protected so that the log remains private.

This is a neat, effective service that many sites will find useful. And the price is right. http://www.uptime.com/

ArsDigita 80 Prospect St. Cambridge, MA 02139 617-386-4100;

-- Anonymous, February 08, 2001

Answers

Cpr,

I wonder if that link (www.uptime.com) is a misprint. I went there and didn't see anything about the service itself.

This is one of those obvious ideas that someone should have thought of before now. I could write a little 'bot that would check MY stuff (if I thought it was that important), but I imagine there are plenty of people who would use it.

The only problem I see with the idea as a business model is that it's terribly easy to copy. If it becomes successful, there will be a thousand "me to!" and imitation sites in business within a few weeks.

-- Anonymous, February 08, 2001