Owing either to high traffic events or server administrators going on holiday without a contingency plan, our users are likely to see lots of downtime throughout the festive season.

To help out, we’ve brought back the plain old telephone system.

As of today, phone call alerts are available in both our server health and uptime monitoring systems.  For example, you can configure phone alerts if free disk space falls below 5% for more than 30 minutes – or if CPU load stays at 100% for a bit too long.

Calls are charged at a flat rate of $0.40 per call.

Naturally you can also configure a phone call if your site goes down altogether.  A useful escalation schedule might be: Email when the downtime first occurs, send an SMS after 10 minutes, and make the phone call after 30 minutes.

We reckon that a phone call is still the best way to wake up your normally over-caffeinated sysadmin at 4am when The Bad Stuff happens. That little SMS *bleep* noise from their phone doesn’t always do the trick.  And knowing that it’s all automatic is even better.

You can learn more about phone call alerts on this page.

Feature Deployed @ 2008-12-01 09:00 GMT