New feature: DNS Change Alerting 
How Does DNS Failover Work? 
Finding Your Network’s Weakest Link Data Backup Is Not Optional
As with most information technologies, the concept of data backup is as deep as it is broad. That is to say, there are many dimensions and facets to the backup of data, and you can spend anywhere from a few days to a few months trying to get a handle on it. A definition is […]
Uptime Institute Ensures IT Infrastructure Reliability
When it comes to IT infrastructure, there’s not much room for error. In fact, businesses have come to expect their data technology environment to be completely reliable. As we wrote in “The Essence of Uptime“, “The standard for network uptime is 99.999% availability.” Data center reliability is essential to the success of the enterprise now […]
Network Availability – Is it Important to you?
Alright, we admit that our company has a certain obsession with network availability we collectively call “uptime”. It’s even in our name. We’re totally committed to keeping services up and running for our clients. And while uptime is our best friend, we seem to spend a lot of time thinking about the enemy: downtime. We’ve […]
Leading Causes of Downtime
IT systems go down for a lot of reasons. Some downtime causes are obvious, while others take some time to understand. And still others are just plain comical. In this article we’ll have a look at different approaches to assigning blame for outages, and we’ll offer a short list of our own. The concept of downtime applies […]
Can Too Much Redundancy Impact Availability?
After unabashedly extolling the virtues of redundancy in a recent article , you may be wondering why we would follow up with another post questioning whether sometimes too much (redundancy) was just too much. Credit fellow staffers for the suggestion that we revisit the issue. The problem was clearly a part of our initial research, and it deserves […]
Selecting the Right Monitors for Your Website
Suppose you’ve just launched a new website and you want to make sure that everything keeps working fine. What’s the next step? You could just hope and pray, but there is merit to being more proactive than that. The responsible thing to do is to monitor your website, including all the critical pages, services, and […]
Redundancy: When Too Much is Just Right
Redundancy is indispensable in the world of information technology. Of course, redundancy is not welcome in every aspect of life. If your company doesn’t need you anymore and makes you “redundant”, you’ll have to look for another job. Poorly written text may be credited to the Department of Redundancy Department. The concept of redundancy is […]
Proactive IT Maintenance to Minimize Downtime
No one needs to explain to you the virtues of being proactive. Of course, no one can make you (or this writer) do it either. You may know that you should change the timing belt on your car every 60,000 miles or so, but it’s even easier to do nothing about it — until your […]
What Went Down in 2017
The internet is replete with Top Ten lists and other rankings. But the criteria for distinguishing between #1 and #10 is often no more than personal whim. So with the caveat that these are not necessarily the worst or the biggest, we’ve decided to list and describe some of the most interesting outages in the […]
Why Ransomware is a Threat to Availability
According to the FBI, ransomware became a billion dollar industry in 2016. That is right, $1 billion. If ransomware were a legitimate industry, it would be the focus of case studies in every business school in the world as its growth is unprecedented. This growth is attributed to four primary reasons. The amount of money […]