Do sites fall on holidays more often than usual? Myths, reality and how to protect yourself

    New Year's holidays are approaching, and this is a special time for many areas of activity. For some it’s a dead season, for others it’s an opportunity to earn extra money. People whose activities are closely related to the operation of sites and in general IT infrastructure are also not easy. On the one hand, I want to relax, but on the other, there is an irrational fear that a carefully tuned system that has been working without interruptions for many months will fall as soon as you turn your back on it. Which is characteristic, often it happens. How can you afford to relax? One solution is external monitoring of the availability of sites and servers .



    Paranoia or is there any reason to worry?


    Of course, everyone knows Murphy’s laws: if some muck can happen, then it will happen. IT people do not need to be reminded of this again. Everyone in the reserve has a story about how backups rolled up on New Year's Eve or a network rose under champagne. In fact, of course, the chance on average is the same as on the other days. But there are two “buts”: firstly, the whole household is left unattended for a bit longer than during a regular weekend, and the responsible employees are all somewhere on vacation; secondly, it may suddenly turn out that at the end of the year a lot of automatic actions are planned, for example, an annual backup or building annual reports, which slightly increase the chances of admins to travel to the office the first morning.

    But there is a very real threat. Often, hackers plan their dirty deeds specifically for the holidays. The reason may be different: calculation for a long reaction time, the best media effect, peak loads on systems in certain areas of the business, etc. For example, last New Year was fun for Air Force admins . And the year before last, Xbox Live and Playstation services fell simultaneously. Even if giants like Microsoft and Sony are at risk, what can we say about mere mortals.

    Hidden threat


    There are more common reasons. For example, forget to pay for hosting services or other related services. If you do not do this ahead of time, then you may not find an accountant during the holiday week. And people during legal holidays do not really like to read work mail, as a result of a reminder about the expiration of a domain or a certificate, you can completely miss a message. By the way, such stories are not uncommon .

    To solve such problems, there are external monitoring services that have the ability to notify the right person, even available during the holidays way. For example, like this .

    Offer help


    Monitoring service HostTracker offers its services as a guard against such surprises. He can check a lot of things and how much to notify:



    And yes, we are writing this publication, already having real experience in catching critical breakdowns precisely for the New Year among our customers, including a hacker hack with a real money leak, which was almoststopped in time. Of course, it’s unpleasant to receive in the middle of the SMS holiday that something is going wrong. But perhaps it’s better to come off for a few minutes than to rake up the rest of the holidays. But let’s be optimistic - if SMS doesn’t come, then this is a nasty feeling, under the names like “I’m responsible,” “I just keep everything on me,” etc. can be unconditionally suppressed in the bud itself.

    Do not forget also that people also work in hosting support. How quickly they will respond to your request is up to their conscience (and wallet, if that), but if we write to them on the 3rd day ...

    As always, we welcome your comments and comments.

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