How to Monitor the health of your shared hosting server

So you got yourself a shiny new web hosting package. In today’s rate, multi-gigabyte storage space and multi-terabyte network traffic is very much affordable.

The thing with this packages is that they are shared-hosting meaning you shared the same physical server with other clients. The ratio of user’s to physical host varied from different providers.

Since you don’t have control on the physical host, it’s good to have a monitoring setup to have a birds eye view on the status of your server at anytime.

But how?

This is where phpSysInfo comes into the picture. It is a customizable PHP script that parses /proc and displays information about the host. The project is license under GPL.

The interface clean and simple but very informative. It is segregated into 5 divisions: System Vital, Hardware Information, Memory Usage, Mounted Filesystems and Network Usage which display about system information like 

   CPU
   Uptime  
   Memory
   PCI devices  
   SCSI devices  
   IDE devices   
   Network adapters and usage  
   Disk usage 

click image to enlarge

Setup is very easy and it doesn’t need root permission since it will just read the information in /proc. Follow the steps below on how to setup:

1. Download the source - here - (hosted under Sourceforge)
2. Upload and extract it in your www root folder (usually public_html/).
3. Type www.<domain>.com/phpsysinfo (replace <domain> with your own domain name) and voila you have an instant monitoring.

The following are nice to have features that should be incorporated in the next revision:

• trends/history graphs based on rrd  (to see what are the times the server is busy)
• database logging
• WP plugin

Update:

There is a Yahoo widget that can extend the monitoring to your desktop. Interested? Read here……

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