You may not have noticed, but in the footer of the site, there is a little banner that says:
Monitored by Panopta
Actually, The Daily WTF has been monitored with Panopta for nearly ten years. I've also been using it to monitor Inedo's important public and on-prem servers, and email and text us when there are issues.
I started using Panopta because it's easy to use and allows you to monitor using a number of different methods (public probes, private probes and server agents). I may install agents for more detailed monitoring going forward, but having Panopta probe HTTP, HTTPS, VPN, and SMTP is sufficient for our needs at the moment. We send custom HTTP payloads to mimic our actual use cases, especially with our registration APIs.
If you're not using a monitoring / alerting platform or want to try something new, now's the time to start!
Panopta is offering The Daily WTF readers six months of free monitoring!
Give it a shot. You may find yourself coming to dread those server outage emails and SMS messages. PROTIP: configure the alerting workflow to send outage notices to someone else to worry about.
Disclaimer: while Panopta is not paid sponsor, they been generously providing free monitoring for The Daily WTF (and Inedo) because they're fans of the site; I thought it was high time to tell you about them!