Do you know when you have a server outage?
November 15, 2007
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On November 12, 2007 Rackspace had an outage and many popular websites were inaccessible for about 3 hours. Sites like 37Signals were down, amongst many others high traffic websites. Web news was full of their stories (Refer TechCrunch, and Slashdot as two examples) for a day talking about what really went wrong. At the end of the day it turned out to be that two chillers within the data center failed to start back up, and a number of servers were taken offline to avoid damage from overheating.
Many times website owners never realize the true extent of all the downtime their website experiences. With an ecommerce website or an advertisement supported website, this downtime means lost revenue and worse yet, lost customers. Online Presence is currently hosted on a virtual hosted server and not on a managed server since the traffic load is not extremely high yet, but I would still feel the pinch and loss of revenue if there was downtime.
I guess a website monitoring service like what AlertBox provides could be beneficial for us. The pricing seems quite competitive as well. For those not aware of AlertBox: AlertBot sends you alerts when your website goes down so you can work on getting it back up as soon as possible.
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Written by 
Anuj Seth · Filed Under Miscellaneous, Random Tips
[...] Let’s take a closer look at the impact of E-commerce applications on change management and testing. One important characteristic from the study jumps out: companies that rely on E-commerce typically experience a higher percentage of emergency changes than companies running other application types. As we’ve discussed previously in regard to testing maturity, companies experience more problems in production when they require IT operations to address a higher number of unscheduled (e.g. emergency) changes. True to form, our most recent study shows that over 25 percent of companies supporting E-commerce applications test less than 50 percent of all changes. As web applications continue to grow in both users and complexity, more outages (a la Yahoo’s Cyber Monday snafu) may become commonplace. Don’t forget that: [...]