Protected by Scarecrow

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Is your website down? Are you sure?

A “site down” message from an uptime monitoring service is most often caused by a regional problem. Which means, among other things, that single-location monitoring is, most of the time, going to be giving “false positives” when the site is actually working fine.

On the other hand, a hosting provider’s in-datacenter monitoring tells you nothing at all about your site’s actual availability from the internet, or whether it is responding with the content you intend. These two issues add up to a major problem in the website hosting industry.

So we offer a distributed system that checks from multiple locations. Instead of just “up” or “down”, Scarecrow has four different ways to classify a site’s status:

• Site UP: Straightforward! But, to be clear, this means that your web server is responding normally, AND that there were no DNS issues (DNS is required for users to actually find your site’s IP address), AND that there were no certificate issues (current certificates are required for secure browsing). All of this is checked from multiple locatiions, which leads us to…
• Disputed outages: This could mean any of a lot of things. The server might be having intermittent issues, there could be a DNS problem, there could be a regional routing problem, or there might be a certificate issue, from one or more locations. BUT, and this is the interesting part: everything was fine from at least one location! Scarecrow identifies exactly what is going on and sends a detailed notification. You can also click the ‘disputed’ status in your dashboard to see the notification details and suggested fixes.
• Confirmed outages: This means that all monitoring locations agreed a site was down. Again, you can check either an email notification or the dashboard status link for further information and ways to recover.
• Content down: Everything else seemed fine, but the content Scarecrow was looking for was not found on your site. This might mean Scarecrow just needs to be updated, or it could be a more serious problem.

For whatever reason, the disputed outage concept is currently unique to Scarecrow. In order of frequency, disputed outages are generally the result of:

1. DNS outages: These are actually so common that, as long as we can get a web server to respond, by default we do NOT count a single-provider DNS issue as an outage (although you can change this via Account Settings). Our DNS Watch page has much more information on this.
2. Regional outages: Also fairly common. It’s good to be aware of these, and know that when a customer can not reach your site (at the moment), it’s not actually an issue on your end. Though if it happens a lot, you might want to consider changing to a more well-connected hosting provider.
3. Intermittent server problems: Maybe the server is simply too busy (with your site or another site hosted on the same machine). Or it could be a database problem. If you see different status from different locations, this could be a clue to an underlying issue. Again, consider your hosting provider’s service level to evaluate this type of problem.

In addition to all that, we also monitor “certificate” status. Valid certificates are essential for visitors to browse your website securely.

Putting it all together? Scarecrow’s distributed uptime service with “disputed” outages, plus multi-provider DNS checks from each location, plus certificate monitoring, is simply unique. Combined with the web page content monitoring we also do, to both detect and assist in recovery from attacked or no-longer-functional websites, the complete package exists nowhere else.