Web service status Reports you can rely on!

Why we exist

The primary goal of Downinspector is to provide the most accurate and up-to-the-minute web service status reports available on the internet.

We’ve all been there, you visit a website or other online service that you use every day, but today all you’re getting is a “This site can’t be reached” type message from your browser. Or maybe the web service loads, but it’s acting weird and glitching out on you.

You want to know if the web service is just down for you or down for everyone else too. You find a few online tools that work by pinging the web service, but they just say the service is up.

What do you do next…?

Downinspector was created to solve this problem. We get information from multiple sources and put them all in one place to give you the information you need to determine the cause of the outage.

When a ping is not enough

Unlike other online tools that check a web services availability just by pinging their server, we use a real browser (Google Chrome).

Using a browser to test if a web service is down or not is far superior to just pinging servers. Pinging a server can only give limited information such as whether or not the server is available and accepting connections.

This is simply not enough information to determine if the service is down or not. For example, the server may send back a status code indicating the server is up, but the web service may not even exist on the server anymore.

Only by visiting the web service in an actual browser and taking a live screenshot of the web page can you be certain on the current status of the service.

How Downinspector works

To determine the current status of a web service Downinspector collects data from several different sources.

Including:

• Pinging the web service to check the server is accepting connections
• Attempting to open the web service in a browser
• Issues reported to Downinspector from users
• Issues reported on social media sites
• Official company announcements on social media

First of all, we run a ping test on the web service and if the ping is successful then load it in a browser.

Once loaded we take a screenshot of the service and gather any errors found in the browser which we then display to the user.

We also scan social media sites e.g. Twitter for recent outage reports and add them to reports sent to us from our users. Gathering user reports is an important step because loading the service in a browser cannot check for certain problems. For example, the service might load correctly in the browser but what if there are sound issues or videos are buffering or you can’t upload images or create posts. Loading the service in a browser can’t detect these kinds of issues, but people can and that’s why we have user reports.

If a significant number of Twitter and user reports are made within a short space of time, this triggers an alert to inform users that the web service is currently experiencing problems.