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server monitoring
What does Modular Merchant do to ensure my website stays up and running? Is there any type of monitoring or emergency plan in place?
In conjunction with our server facility, Modular Merchant maintains constant monitoring of all of our servers, including shared, semi-dedicated, and dedicated servers. The server monitoring features include Port Monitoring, Ping, and Load Averages.
Port Monitoring
The server's primary communication services are polled every few minutes to ensure that they are online. The service is considered down if the poll was unsuccessful for the number of retries (by default 3) for any of the following:
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A route to the IP address is not available.
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The connection is refused.
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The connection times out (by default 10 seconds unless otherwise specified).
As long as the service is online, the service will be polled every 5 minutes. Once a service is down, it will poll every 30 seconds until either the service comes back up or 5 minutes have elapsed at which that point it will go back to the default polling interval.
The services that are polled include:
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HTTP (The service that serves web pages.)
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POP3 (Related to email delivery.)
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SMTP (Also related to email delivery.)
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MySQL (The service that operates databases.)
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SFTP (The service that manages uploading and downloading files to the server.)
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SSH (The service that manages the server's shell communication.)
If one of the services listed above goes offline, alerts are generated within the server facility, and a server technician is dispatched to investigate and resolve the issue ASAP.
Ping
An ICMP ping request is sent to the IP address of the server every 5 minutes, requiring a response within 5 seconds. If it doesn't respond within 5 seconds, it tries every 30 seconds until the service comes back or reaches the 5 minute mark. If it responds in time, it resumes to regular polling. Otherwise an alert is generated within the server facility, and action is taken as necessary.
Load Averages
Each server is pinged once per minute to retrieve its load average (how hard the server's processor is working). The load average results are displayed in the control panel used by all members of the Modular Merchant support team, and are updated every minute. If a server's load increases outside the range of acceptable performance, the appropriate action is taken immediately. The action taken will vary, depending on the cause of the high load.
The combination of monitoring and emergency procedures listed above are designed to keep all of our clients' websites up and running reliably 24/7.
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