Public uptime URL from pingdom.com

There were some reports recently in our forum about people having problems accessing the FastMail website and IMAP services. There’s been no recent outages on our servers (the last problem we had was with one IMAP server on Aug 12 as reported on our status blog), so it can be hard to work out exactly where the problem is.

To try and get a sense of if the problem is with the site in general, or only a localised one, I’ve setup an account at www.pingdom.com to check our servers regularly. The nice thing about pingdom.com is that they’re a completely independent service that have servers situated around the world, so we are getting a broad health check. The things I’ve setup to check are:

• Fetch the login page http://www.fastmail.fm every 5 minutes
• Check messagingengine.com resolves via DNS every 5 minutes
• Check the IMAP server responds at mail.messagingengine.com every 5
  minutes
• Ping ns1.messagingengine.com (the main IP at our NYC data center)
  every 1 minute

pingdom.com allows you to make the reports public, so I’ve done that. The URL for the public reports of the above tests is here:

http://stats.pingdom.com/w17m1yxzjyin

Another recommendation if you’re experiencing intermittent problems is to download our network test tool fasttest.exe and keep a copy on your computer. When you experience any problems, run the program and it will run a series of network tests and generate a diagnostic report that may help us track down any problems.