We recently received a message from a Server Check user, which stated: “Thank you so much – you guys just saved the internet!”
Intrigued, we followed up on the posting to see what was going on and get some more info. It turns out that a small internet and hosting provider here in the UK had started using Server Check and they were able to save themselves from an onslaught of thousands of angry customers thanks to two alerts they had set up in the software.
Here’s more of the story they sent us:
Thanks for getting back to me. We are a small ISP in UK near London. I downloaded Server Check about a month ago and we set up a few monitors in the free version. I am one of the sysadmins and we’ve been putting in some new servers in the last week. We’d deployed quite a few of these and we’d started moving customers to them in blocks. The alert came to me first by SMS, followed by an email about 5 seconds later telling me that the pings had stopped. It was just before midnight and I wasn’t on shift but I gave my colleague a call to find out more. He went to investigate and found one of our PDUs was running red hot and everything had just shut down in that rack. He quickly swapped it out for another and brought everything back online, and tossed the dodgy PSU onto the “needs looking at but will probably not get fixed” pile. It wasn’t quite that simple but you get the idea, he thought that was that and went back to other night shift necessaries.
So I’m back in the next evening and I get another alert by SMS and email. This time telling me the system running Server Check has lost mains power and is running on battery backup. I go to investigate and find another rack – which happened to be the one with the server running the software – with the same issue. PDU totally overheated, power shutting down to servers in the rack.
If these servers had gone offline for any length of time we’d have been stuffed – we provide internet to lots of local businesses as well as hosting and email. We’re small so we’ve been very reluctant to pay huge amounts for monitoring systems in the past so when we saw that Server Check was a thing I thought I’d give it a go. We just need to know when something’s up and when it goes down, so it’s perfect. You guys saved the day twice with your ping alerts and your power loss alerts. We’d have lost the ability to provide internet connectivity if we hadn’t had the early warnings from Server Check.
The power units had faulty fuse modules and we’re getting them all replaced.
I’d tell anyone to set up Server Check – or get some kind of monitoring. Even if they are small, even if they have half a dozen clients and host a couple of websites for each one – Server Check just gives us peace of mind that if something goes down, or goes off, or stops responding, that we’ll know about it within minutes.
So there you have it. We saved the internet (in a small corner of a London business hub) and helped keep downtime, response times and fix times to the absolute minimum!
Hurrah for Server Check!
Feel free to try out the FREE version which gets you 10 monitors for free, forever. You can grab it here: https://servercheck.co.uk/download/