Tracking The Status Of Popular Websites?

An Unnamed Correspondent asks: "I am one of those that decided, a long time ago, to use a @yahoo.com free mail account as a permanent address, since I move from one ISP to another all the time. Last week, I was having huge problems with my free account, the SMTP servers for Yahoo! were down. I didn't know if this was a problem local to me or if it was Yahoo!'s fault. I sent them an e-mail asking about this, but I received no reply. I have been browsing all of Yahoo! to see if they have some kind of net status, to no avail. The other day CNN.com was not working for me. Maybe it was overloaded because of the elections, but I didn't know, and I couldn't find out. Is there some kind of Web page giving news about the status of the more popular Web services?" An interesting idea ... would something like this be possible to pull off in an effective way (and what would one do if the monitoring service itself is unavailable?)

Comments

Some useful sites for that...

[xee]

Netcraft: www.netcraft.com
Netcraft will tell you the uptime history of any site that it watches (currently over 22 million)

Keynote: internetpulse.keynote.com
Keynote has some really cool cross-backbone nodes that tell you the performance from one backbone to another.

Whatsdown.net: www.whatsdown.net
Whatsdown watches various sites and backbones and tells you the current performance of them. This is probably what you want, because it watches specific popular sites.

Check out Google's directory (DMOZ) for some more sites like these. I hope this helped.


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