Does your Uptime Monitor check from all of the locations simultaneously?

Short answer:

Yes, our system checks your uptime monitor target from all of the selected locations at the same time, so if you select (for instance) to monitor from 6 locations, then all 6 locations will ping your website/service, every one minute.

Longer answer:

Most of the uptime monitoring systems out there today will check your website or server from just one location every minute, and if that one location reports the target as being down, then follow-up locations start checking as well in order to confirm or deny the initial assessment.

So why is this a bad thing?

Well, for one, with such a system, your website or server isn’t actually monitored from multiple different locations, but just from one location really. So if they advertise as monitoring form multiple different locations, and if you pay for such a package, then you should get exactly that, a system that will simultaneously check your website or server from all of the locations.

Furthermore, with this type of system it will take considerably longer for it to notice your downtime, taking into account the fact that if the first location fails, only then further location checks get triggered, so by the time their system actually figures out that your website or server is down, it can sum up to a big delay.

So how does HetrixTools handle it?

Our system will check from all the locations at the same time, as frequently as every minute. Which means that our system will notice your downtime much faster than the systems described above, considering the fact that the data from all monitoring locations is centralized at the same time.

Also, having multiple locations feeding in data into our central system about your uptime monitor every minute, will generate much more precise statistics, such as response times and outage history.

But, wouldn’t 6 simultaneous checks impact my website or server’s performance?

No, having 6 extra connections per minute on your website or server should really have no performance impact whatsoever.

Why are the other services checking one location at a time, while HetrixTools checks all of them at once?

The main reason would be that they want to drastically reduce server costs, because it’s much cheaper to just check from one location instead of checking from all 6 at the same time, saving money on bandwidth, CPU processing power, RAM, etc. While we, at HetrixTools, believe that if the client is purchasing a package that says their website or server will be checked from 6 locations, we should deliver exactly that and check the uptime monitor from all locations simultaneously.

Doesn’t this mean that your server costs are higher? And your prices should be much higher?

It does mean exactly that, well, the first part at least. Our server costs may be higher than our competitors’, but we feel that our prices are exactly right for the products that we offer. We don’t feel right to needlessly overcharge clients, so our prices are more than enough to cover the higher server costs, while still bringing in a profit.