What happens when the sites and server goes down!

Salams

Thought id write a bit about what happens when sites and server goes down - as with any webhosting company this tends to happen!

All of our servers at the moment are monitored 24X7 which means basically someone is watching it - not literally but it is being watched by a system and that system is being watched by humans!

The monitoring services are PING and HTTP

Ping is basically the protocol which determines to see if the Server is online!

HTTP is the protocol for your websites which keeps then running

If ping goes down then nothing nada will work because with ping going down it usually means that the server has fell off the network, someone has unplugged it or the network is down then it means we start to panic!!!

if HTTP is down its not the end of the world - well for clients it maybe as its their website but luckily from a techician view its not because if ping is working then we can login remotely to the server and restart http service

Soo what does this have to do with anything?

Alot - If our servers or services goes down we are automatically notified, it could be 9am in the morning or 2am on a sunday morning servers are unpredictable it can go down anytime for unknown reasons at times!

Soo the server goes down we are notified we being to panic...once we know about this we are aware of the problem the next thing is to rectify the issues

our core network technicians are based in the states.

So if the server goes down....we either get an email (if we are online) or get a text message if we are asleep.....then next thing is to figure out the problem

once sites are online we tell customers to allow us atleast 1 hour to get the server back up - 99% of time its up within 15mins but sometimes the problem may be a bit more complex which requires alot of thinking of whats gone wrong and what to do next..sometimes there could be powercuts, network failures! or sometimes it could be simply that someone has decided to do something crazy on the server like send out 10000s of emails at once or run this dodgy script on their site which takes the server down.

Soo if the server goes down or your sites not working you can do the following:

1) try accessing www.mpadc.com or www.muslimdot.com

if that works and you can view those sites and not yours open a helpdesk ticket
http://support.mpadc.com

If none of the websites work or open then if you have someone else you know on a different network then get them to try it, if it works from there end then there is something wrong with your network connection contact us on helpdesk incase its a firewall issue that has blocked you out on the server or wait around 30mins to see if it resolves itself

if no luck with any of the above then go for a Pinnnnnnng!

Try pinging the box
Start > Run type in cmd

then type
ping mpadc.com, if you get something like the below then the server is online but http is down

We are aware of this by now and will just restart the http server


Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6000]
Copyright (c) 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Users\>ping mpadc.com

Pinging mpadc.com [69.16.237.199] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 69.16.237.199: bytes=32 time=119ms TTL=46
Reply from 69.16.237.199: bytes=32 time=118ms TTL=46
Reply from 69.16.237.199: bytes=32 time=116ms TTL=46
Reply from 69.16.237.199: bytes=32 time=117ms TTL=46

Ping statistics for 69.16.237.199:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 116ms, Maximum = 119ms, Average = 117ms

C:\Users\>


If you dont get any of the above then the server has been dropped from the network - and yes we are aware of this and are working on it!

Give us 1 hr and see if we can sort it out - if not then give us a call on the number provided to you in the welcome email - you can ring us anytime of the day night we are always around on that number!

If there are any major issues we will try and email you or post on this blog!!!