As always, the more you know about your server, the better. That is one mantra valid all throughout the Web-Hosting business. Once you have this clear, you will understand why we have so many monitoring tools, excelling in their own way. The better they give you information about your server, the better they are. As each monitoring tool gives information as they see important, depending on more than one single tool to monitor your server is not at all a bad idea. On the other hand, the closer you keep track of your server; that too from various angles, will put you in a much better off position. Now lets check what are the situations when you need to be notified.

• Spamming, and your server got blacklisted. –> Your users can’t mail to the rest of world.
• Server down, services down etc. –> The whole world cannot access your server’s services.

Now there comes this one *big* factor of reputation. You had an accident, there was a spamming attack that originated from your server. Ok fine, now what? You will have no clue which all blacklisting-lists blacklisted you. That is exactly where MX Toolbox’s Free Email Server Monitoring come to save your day.

What It Does

• Blacklist Monitoring– Email alerts if your server shows up on any of 150 email blacklists
• Availability Monitoring– Email and pager alerts if your mail server goes down
• Performance Monitoring– See your server performance trends over time Benefits

Monitoring Times or Polling Intervals are normally every 15 minutes for SMTP test, once in a 24 hour period for blacklist. Mx Toolbox has been server administrator’s best pal for years. In fact, we had another post from Hamish in our Bobcares Blog where he explained on “How to stay off the blacklist” which encourages usage of tools from MxToolBox.

In the end, its all about maximizing the availability of all the services that your server provides. So, if you ask me, all the tools that helps you in this regard, should be exploited. After all, its your server.

About the Author

Jeevan Joseph has been with Bobcares for a year, and is now heading the Public Relations wing of the company. He has worked as a developer as well as a technical support in the past for startups to Datacenters.

Jeevan, after graduating in Electronics and Communications Engineering, turned into the web-hosting domain out of the passion for open source. As an eloquent orator, he spends his spare time with the Toastmasters, and have given sessions to over 2500 people in the past 4 years.