Monitoring solution for external cheap-ass shared hosting

Question

Some friends of mine started hosting their first startup's code on an extremely DB-constrained shared hosting with surprisingly good customer support; this means that on a given day, while their DB server will refuse connections 10-15 times it's always back up and working the minute they nag customer support.

This situation has led me to start building an ad-hoc solution to regularly ping the server for info, but then, there HAS to be some kind of alternative (maybe similar to nagios? with which I have some limited experience). Does anyone here know of any free/OSS solution for this problem?

Notes:

Neither them or I have SSH access, this is a shared hosting running heavily restricted permissions
The preferred solution would also be able to handle e-mail alerts

Thanks!

This question is off-topic as we don't offer product recommendations, as shown here. — Nathan C, Jul 06 '13 at 16:29
Fascinating. So, you're telling me that this would be extremely valid a question if I asked "how do I log this" and someone said, package X, but, the way it's phrased, it's offtopic? You've got to be kidding me. — Carlos Vergara, Jul 06 '13 at 16:47
@CarlosVergara Please read What topics can I ask about here? — colealtdelete, Jul 06 '13 at 16:50
Don't they have better things to do than to nag customer support all the time? Like, for instance, developing? None of them have an extra $5 bucks to throw at a cheap VPS? — Michael Hampton, Jul 06 '13 at 18:32
Them being extremely strapped for cash is a nontrivial problem here — Carlos Vergara, Jul 06 '13 at 19:23
Duplicate to other questions asked here. http://serverfault.com/questions/112329/looking-for-server-monitoring-app-nothing-fancy-for-windows/112903#112903 or http://serverfault.com/questions/44/what-tool-do-you-use-to-monitor-your-servers — Fiasco Labs, Jul 06 '13 at 20:49

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 06 '13 at 18:02

1

If you just want to be alerted when the web service goes down, pingdom's free tier is sufficient. But please, as soon as the startup makes money do yourself a favour and spend some time on a better server (and maybe a paid pingdom account with more alerting features).

answered Jul 06 '13 at 18:02

Dennis Kaarsemaker

19,527

and maybe an experienced sysadmin – Luke404 Jul 06 '13 at 18:12
sadly, that's often rather low on a startup's wishlist :) – Dennis Kaarsemaker Jul 06 '13 at 18:13
1

Startups are companies, not people having fun, and companies have requirements, not wishes: those who fail to recognize their requirements will simply fail to be successful and eventually die. Natural selection at work in an artificial human-created context :) – Luke404 Jul 06 '13 at 18:22
Pingdom sounds like it will work on the short term; what's their resolution (ie eac how many minutes do they try and crawl the site)?
As soon as they get to make a cent I'm convincing them (hell, I'm trying right now to convince them) to move to a place where we can have a proper monitoring system installed. My particular issue is that right now that's not viable.
– Carlos Vergara Jul 06 '13 at 19:26
They can check every minute, but every 5 minutes should be enough. – Dennis Kaarsemaker Jul 06 '13 at 19:40

Monitoring solution for external cheap-ass shared hosting

1 Answers1