How to take care of sites during the holidays

The notorious human factor during long holidays is especially aggravated. In such weeks, by many excuses, establishments may open later, and business meetings may be postponed by mutual agreement. But what if you account for the mistake with the well-being of your business? Or some important parts of your mortal body? Cloud monitoring services help to find peace of mind for those whose sites should work forever . The application of one of them in such situations will be discussed later.

Real life

Just yesterday, a complaint was received from an online store about unauthorized monitoring. We found a client, asked what relation it has to the checked site. It turned out the following: he made and paid for the order in this store, but then the site stopped working. The client could not even watch the support contact during the day! He found a simple solution - put the site under monitoring to find out when it will work again. And then I forgot to take it off. Question: why didn’t the store take similar steps?

Holidays: waiting or afraid

So, there is a task: the site / server / service should work continuously for several days without human intervention. What can prevent this?

Firstly, the usual failures that happen everywhere from time to time. Only now a night failure from Tuesday to Wednesday is solved by overloading / reloading from backup on Wednesday morning. And on weekends, crashes from Friday to Monday are not uncommon. How much in this case the site may lie during the holidays depends on the length of the vacation of the responsible employees.

Secondly, people also work with the hoster (for now) And this means that they, too, can go on vacation, leaving on the farm 3.5 gouging randomly turned up on the arm. And besides, before going on vacation, they can easily plan a hardware upgrade / megaback / bunch of updates, following the logic of "no one will notice." What to do with it - I wrote earlier .

Thirdly, unscrupulous competitors or cybercriminals often plan their black deeds precisely for this time, counting on the increased reaction time on your part.

For example, here it is as it happens when regular cleaning of the database falls off - how it grows (below) and how the time for requests to it (above) grows, and this is still a light version of what can be in such cases.



All this leads to direct and indirect losses of money and customers and easily spoil the aftertaste for everyone after the holidays.

What to do?

A solution can be found for little money or even for free, depending on your needs. I will describe the approach using the site monitoring service HostTracker . I’m ahead of the question: yes, there is Yandex.Metrica and similar things. But what are their differences and disadvantages, I explained in detail here . In short, this is not their main function, and sending an alert in a few hours is the norm. Moreover, not all errors fall into their field of vision.



Here is one of the real examples of last year. As you can see, the site is often not good, but on weekdays the problem is solved quickly. How long would the decision take on May 1 if not for monitoring? Instead of 5 hours, it could be a couple of days, and this is not uncommon.

In addition to the usual problems, sites during the long absence of their watchful guards also like to pick up other ailments. For example, a domain or certificate might expire . Or he may fall into the lists of DNSBL or Roskomnadzor . Or, as in the example above - the database will decide to grow fat . And from all this we will also cure you.

As always, we welcome all suggestions and wishes. And have a good rest!