Static File Checking
Posted on February 27th, 2010 by Chris Coyier
In general, we recommend checking the root of your site, e.g.:
http://css-tricks.com/
However, if you find that you are getting exorbitant “false positives” (down notifications when the site isn’t down) or if you have added your site and we are telling you it’s down right after adding it (when it clearly isn’t down), we recommend static file checking.
Instead of checking the root domain, check a static file e.g.
http://css-tricks.com/amsu.txt
http://css-tricks.com/style.css
The deal is that sometimes applications running on the server behave funny when we do our check. It may be because of the lack of user-agent (something we’re working on) or the fact that many applications do lots of internal redirects before actually serving up a page (we’re limited as to how many redirects we will follow) or sometimes simply because the application gives us a 404 for some unknown reason.
Checking a static file may help these issues, but still be perfectly adequate for watching for serious site outages.
Would this help with server timeouts at all? I seem to be getting emails everyday telling me my server has timed out.
It may, yes, give it a shot.
I’ve noticed that the “aremysitesup.com” servers are using a decent chunk of my bandwidth.
It seems that if I set a static file as the URL, with just “OK” or something in it, then I could reduce that significantly.
Do you have any thoughts on this?
On the highest premium plan, AMSU only hits a site about 100 times a day, so I hope it’s not too crazy bandwidth intensive!
But if that’s a major concern, yes, checking a very small text fill will definitely help.