About Pingability

What We Do

Do you want a good uptime on your servers?  The Pingability service monitors your servers (including web page checks, and email server checks).  We can alert you if the server goes down so you can respond rapidly.

The People

The Pingability site is part of the same company that operates rimuhosting.com, the VPS hosting company.  This background lets us leverage the technical expertise of our staff and our strong hosting infrastruture so that we can provide a reliable, usable monitoring service to both technical and non-technical users.

The Network

The main Pingability service operates out of a Dallas (USA) data-center and failed check results are verified by redundant network providers. If you need to open your firewalls so our service can perform checks then we may check from the following IPs: 202.125.45.163 (Brisbane), 207.210.209.134 (Dallas), 72.249.37.67 (Dallas), 66.199.251.173 (NY), 202.125.45.163 (NY).

The Web Site

  • Our goal is to create a very usable user interface.  We are always keen to hear ideas on how we can fix or improve the site.
  • The site is coded using XHTML, CSS, and Javascript (the latter where it will improve the site usability).
  • This site looks best when viewed in a non-IE browser. No, really. IE does not support transparent PNG images. Try Firefox on the site and we will detect this fact and present clearer and more visually interesting images.
  • We use DWR/Ajax in a few places throughout the site to improve the site usability.  e.g. When setting your own timezone.

The Technology

Our goal is to provide a server monitoring service that 'just works'. But if you are at all curious about how it all works behind the scenes, then read on …

  • The site code and monitoring code is all Java/JSP.
  • The software is running on Tomcat
  • Apache's HTTPClient is used for the web page checks.  And their Commons Net libraries are used for the FTP checks.
  • JFreeChart is used for the pie charts, and JRobin is used for the response time charts.
  • dnsjava is used in our DNS checks.
  • We use the ClickATell service to send out SMS alerts.
  • We use the aql service to send out phone alerts.
  • We use Ganymed SSH2 for our SSH actions.