subject: Monitoring Your Vps Or Dedicated Server [print this page] The monitoring aspect with your VPS or Dedicated server, particularly when you are hosting clients on them, revolves mainly around the Uptime of your Website. To put it in simple words, you must always engage a monitoring service to make sure that your VPS or dedicated server is running intact and if at all there is a downtime it should be notified immediately so that you can resolve the problem yourself or maybe notify the customer support service team of your web hosting company, so that there is minimal downtime caused to the visitors and your server is back online within few minutes.
A reliable web hosting company might have certain conditions on the uptime, like in most cases, it states that if a customer's service is down for more than a certain period of time, or if the monthly uptime record does not match with the set record, the customers can request for a refund. And so this is also a compelling reason for many web hosts to fix a server problem having similar terms and conditions. A majority of web hosts prefer using their own internal monitoring system of their servers, for addressing a problem quickly than an external solution. External monitoring services generally monitor your websites or servers from various geographic locations so that they can provide more reliable information while checking if your VPS or Dedicated Server is online. Monitoring system checks your VPS or Dedicated Server from one location or one country or data centre, where results can be slightly inaccurate or non-reliable.
If you use an internal monitoring system, you need to install an 'agent' program that posts data about your server to the master monitoring node, to get information on the server's CPU running speed and the unused memory from internal access to your server. To maximise the uptime of your VPS or Dedicated Server, you need to optimise the programs installed onto it, so that not too many resources are used up, as server crashing mainly happens due to lack of resources availability for the smooth running of the operating system.
Its also suggested that you signup with premium services like pingdom which would continiously ping your website from different locations all around the world and send you instant notification if there is any error found on the web pages or if the server is down. This ensures that you are alerted on time with notifications following which you can try to fix all the problems.
