Adventures in Running a Web Server

Uptime

Hosting providers often brag about uptime, but are their claims true?  I use a super cheap VPS (123systems.net), so I don’t know if I’m getting what I’m paying for. I am not sure if I’m getting 99.9% uptime, but overall I’m pretty happy considering the price.

I notice my server isn’t always available, so I set up some monitors.  One is GotSiteMonitor.com, which sends me an email when the site goes down, and then when it goes back up.  I get a nice simple log in my inbox that way.

PRTG Monitoring

Another monitoring solution is PRTG (http://www.paessler.com/prtg).  It is elaborate, and it is great.  It will scan your network, monitor free disk space, free memory, etc., or even log into your servers to run SSH scripts and report back.  It will tell you if your windows machine’s Windows Defender is disabled for some reason.  (WMI integration.)  It can monitor page load time, and display a popup on your desktop if something bad happens.  It monitors ping times.  It also has mobile apps.  It is free to have 10 sensors, and think I get free extra 20 sensors if I simply spread the word by posting their banner on this page:

Huzzah!

Something did go wrong for me once, and PRTG picked it up and alerted me.  My FastCGI server crashed for some reason.  I had to log into it and manually restart it.  I love dashboards, so PRTG’s dash is pretty cool!

Spam

I’d like to have a forum, and I already run WordPress, so I thought I’d try one that integrates with it: bbPress.

After not checking the server for a while, I came back to about 1300 spam topics and 8000 spam replies!

I have closed down anonymous posting — you’ll have to create an account.  On my personal site I use Disqus for page comments.  I could use that.

For a forum, I could go with a top of the line dedicated forum like vBulletin.  I may still go that route.