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By the very nature of testing thousands of websites every second sometimes sites can be marked down when they are in fact up. There is a wide range of reasons for this – some our side and some on the side of the website being tested.
At StatusCake.com we understand that false alarms can diminish how you react to alerts – is it really down this time? – the boy who cried wolf if you will. We’ve recently been looking into the issue of false alerts which can happen (not just on StatusCake but any website monitoring service) and have come up with a solution that eliminates the problem.
From today we’re happy to be using what we’re calling StatusCake ‘SureAlert’. The system is not only asks one server if your site is down, but a range of servers in the same country will also be asked to check on whether the initial initial diagnosis of downtime is correct. If all our website monitoring servers agree that it is indeed an instance of downtime then we’ll send out the notification alert. If our other servers don’t agree – our “confirmation servers” then we ask the original server which classed your site as down to test again and be sure it is actually down and wasn’t the result of a momentary blip in performance on either server.
With SureAlert we intend to really add the full force of concern that a downtime alert from StatusCake should bring – You will know that when you get have website downtime and need to act on it. And it’s not a false alarm. SureAlert is now live on all services and we welcome feedback on this new feature.
James Barnes
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