Do sites fall on holidays more often than usual? Myths, reality and how to protect yourself

New Year holidays are coming, and this is a special time for many areas of activity. For some, this is a low season, for others it is an opportunity to earn extra money. People whose work is closely connected with the work of sites and IT infrastructure in general is also not easy. On the one hand, I want to relax, but on the other - there is an irrational fear that the most carefully tuned system that has been working without interruption for many months will fall as soon as you turn away from it. Which is typical, it often happens. How can you afford to relax? One of the outputs is external monitoring of the availability of sites and servers .

Paranoia or is there any reason to worry?

Of course, everyone knows the laws of Murphy: if some muck can happen, then it will happen. IT people about this once again do not need to be reminded. Everyone in the reserve has a story about how backups rolled up or a network was raised under the champagne on New Year's Eve. In fact, of course, the chance on average is the same as in other days. But there are two “but”: firstly, the whole farm remains unattended for a little longer than during a regular weekend, and the responsible employees are completely somewhere on vacation; secondly, it may suddenly appear that at the end of the year many automatic actions are planned, for example, an annual backup or the construction of annual reports, which somewhat increase the chances of administrators for going to the office in the morning of the first one.



But there is a very real threat. Often, hackers plan their dirty deeds for the holidays. The reason may be different: calculation for a long reaction time, better media effect, peak loads on systems in certain business areas, etc. For example, last year was fun for the Air Force admins . And the Christmas before last fell at the same time Xbox Live and Playstation services. Even if giants like Microsoft and Sony are at risk, let alone ordinary mortals.

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Hidden threat

There are more banal reasons. For example, forget to pay for hosting services or other related. If you do not do it ahead of time - then you can not find an accountant during the holiday week. And people during legal rest do not like to read work mail, as a result of a reminder about the expiration of a domain or certificate, you can accidentally miss it. By the way, such stories are not uncommon .



To solve such problems, there are external monitoring services that have the ability to notify the right person even in an affordable way during the holidays. For example, like this .

We offer help

Monitoring service HostTracker offers its services as a safety against such surprises. He can check a lot of things and how much to notify:







And yes, we are writing this publication, having already had a real experience of catching critical failures on the New Year among our clients, including hacker hacking with a real money leak, which was almost stopped in time. Of course, it’s unpleasant to receive SMS at the height of the holiday that something is amiss. But, perhaps, it is better to come off for a few minutes than to rake happiness for the rest of the holidays. But let us be optimistic - if SMS does not come, then this is a nasty feeling, under names like “I’m responsible,” “everything holds on me,” and so on. can be unconditionally suppressed in the bud.



Do not forget also that in the support of hosting, too, people work. How quickly they will respond to your request is on their conscience (and wallet, if that), but if we write to them on the 3rd day ...



As always - welcome your comments and comments.