I have zero affiliation with the group, apart from being a casual user but http://wasitup.com/ has come in handy for me quite often. Even for free, it'll do a check 20 times an hour.
Another vote for wasitup.com. I use wasitup.com, host-tracker.com, and basicstate.com, and wasitup.com is consistently the first one to report an outage, followed by basicstate, which has a surprisingly gloomy and odd interface, yet good service, and then followed by host-tracker.com, which sucks pretty much on all levels. All are free btw.
Pingdom also has a very good free plan. It's limited to one url, but for that URL, it's just as good as their paid plans. So you get checks from a ton of DC's, and it tracks response time as well as uptime.
It hasn't been well publicized after the original announcement (and isn't prominently placed on their plans page, either) but I've had great success with Cloudkick's free developer plan on my personal virt (which is still down..):
CK sent me a text message as soon as my host went down earlier, which gave me time to file the ticket against Linode.
Only caveat - they don't provide a signed RPM, which can cause some administrative hardship for linux users using rpm-based distributions (most of the yum operations require you to add an extra cli option to allow working with unsigned rpm's), but it's a minor complaint given that their agent isn't mandatory and doesn't need a lot of updates.
I've had power transfer switches fail more than once. Just because you have a redundancy available doesn't mean you are reducing failure points in the system.
I live right down the street from the datacenter (~ 0.5 miles). The whole area's power was out for a bit, but know more than an hour. My site is having errors.
That's a good case in point. In general you're better off choosing locations further away from where you live/work to prevent issues like this where your office/home and datacenter could be affected at the same time.
We had just launched a test server about 40 minutes ago and had been waiting for it to boot for ages when I finally thought to check the status page. Talk about bad timing.
Linode has multiple "availability zones" aka datacenters so you can achieve the same redundancy with them. I would guess that linodes have better uptimes than aws but I don't have any numbers to actually back that up.
Going on 4 hours of downtime here, this is a disaster. Linode used to be really honest about the status of things, this time, they claim "most linodes should be booted" which seems not to be true.
I wonder if this was related to the crappy weather in the south bay? My power was out for from 8 until 8:45ish (PST). Of course, I would hope their datacenter has a UPS and generators...
there was a brief outage at the hurricane electric datacenter in fremont, probably due to the storm that came through the bay area this evening. our servers (not part of linode) went down, too, but were back up a couple minutes later. i can't confirm the cause, though, b/c i can't reach anyone at he.net on the phone. =(
The just queued the restart at some very low value of a unix timestamp, which translates to 36 years ago. Strangely, not the unix epoch at midnight Jan 1 1970.
Go to https://www.linode.com instead. They've got a wildcard SSL certificate for *.linode.com, which will not work (and has never worked) without a subdomain like "www".
And here as well. Am I justified in being pissed about this outage, or am I failing in my responsibilities by relying on a company like linode to keep my site up?
If you get a single server/vps from anyone, you should assume that it might go down for a few hours at any point. If that's a problem for you, you should create your own redundancy. No matter how much redundancy your provider claims.
