Windows

I use http://www.ipsentry.com

It works great and is well worth the money (less than $100). You can monitor anything you run and even set it up to restart the service when it stops. I had this problem once and it worked to fix it, but eventually it kept going down so often that I had to switch to using secureIIS from http://eeye.com. That was about $500, but at the time, I didn't have time to do something else. It stopped the shutdowns completely. I think a hacker was causing them. They had a free trial version so I saw it working first. Then it expired and started crashing again, so I just coughed up the bucks to get it off my back. In hind site, running all the security patches may have fixed it and also since then I have my ISP blocking ports 135-139 and 445 which blocks any SMB and keeps hackers from trying to login to the servers. That helped a bunch as well as disabling anonymous access using a registry hack. There should be no reason to upgrade, I still have 2 NT4 web servers and they seem to do a good job. An upgrade will require a stronger PC. Usually you are better off adding a 2K or 2K3 Server and then migrating your stuff over. Best to add 2 of them and setup a DFS Root and then your websites aren't down when you take one down for backups or maintenance.

My suggestion for monitoring if the WWW service (or ANY Windows service for that matter) is to run IPMonitor.
www.ipmonitor.com
It will monitor web site connectivity, SMTP, POP3, or if any Windows Service is running or not.
So, you could set up IPMonitor, and have it monitor the SMTP and W3SVC services. If either one Stops, IPMonitor can RESTART the service!
Good product. Been using it since 1999.

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