Keep an Eye on the Cloud

As we move more and more of our work into the cloud, web workers are occasionally finding themselves at the mercy of ISPs and backend servers. It’s annoying enough when Amazon goes down and takes out a bunch of Web 2.0 sites, but what do you do when you’re not sure where the problem is? Two new services can help you at least diagnose, if not fix, cloud issues.

First, Amazon itself has introduced a Service Health Dashboard showing the status of all of their services. It includes not only current status, but RSS feeds and a running log of service history. This one will mostly be useful to cloud companies, who can use the feeds to inform customers of any pertinent outages.

Second, if you can get online but not reach your favorite site, try the aptly-named Down for everyone or just me (at the easy-to-remember URL downforeveryoneorjustme.com). Put in a URL, click the link, and they’ll tell you whether their servers can reach the URL in question.

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