Uh, oh!

Rackspace, a major cloud-computing provider, experienced a connectivity loss at its Dallas-Fort Worth, TX, data center for more than a half hour on the afternoon of Dec. 18^th. During that time, customers could not access business services at the data center.

Among the first to notice the outage was cloud-based monitoring service, Monitis, which also monitors the performance of such providers as Amazon, Google and GoGrid on behalf of clients.

Again, as I’ve said many times in this blog, I can’t stress the importance of having an independent means to monitor and verify your cloud services provider. I believe that we’ll get to a point in the not too distant future when downtime will be a rare occurrence – rarer than it is now.

But until then, if you’re a business on the web, you owe it to yourself to protect it via a monitoring system that can be done from anywhere in the world and round the clock – via the cloud – and then warn you when things start to go wrong (from the end-user experience).

Listen to what one company said upon learning of the Rackspace outage from its monitoring service: “I was very impressed with the alerting when Rackspace (our hosting provider) went down,” said Nigel Hanson of Trimble, a company that provides positioning solutions such as GPS and lasers to companies to be more productive. “Monitis told us exactly when the servers went offline, and exactly when the world could see them again. Thanks for making such a great product.”

Don’t let downtime and the resulting bad experiences that consumers and users encounter take you by surprise! Check out how 24/7 cloud-based monitoring of cloud providers can bring you peace of mind!