Watching the Clouds: CloudClimate.com Provides Free Performance Monitoring of Cloud Hosting Vendors

Originally published on May 06, 2009 by Dirk Paessler
Last updated on March 03, 2022 • 4 minute read

Today www.cloudclimate.com officially leaves "stealth mode", it is now publicly available. For the last weeks we have been preparing this new website that displays the live performance data of selected cloud hosting providers.
 
Using our network monitoring software PRTG Network Monitor we monitor the 
performance of cloud hosting services Amazon EC2, GoGrid CloudServers, and 
NewServers. We also provide live performance data for CDN hosting services Amazon CloudFront and Mosso CloudFiles as well as Amazon S3 file storage service. We will keep this website in a web-2.0-ish "beta" state for some time as we will continue to improve website and monitoring setup. New providers/vendors and new sensor types will be added in the future, too.

How Does It Work?

CloudClimate.com is based on two building blocks:
  • 1. A globally distributed installation of PRTG Network Monitor with one core server installation (running on Amazon EC2) and a number of remote probes used to measure system performance and to remotely monitor performance of network services. It gathers and stores the data and creates the graphs.
  • 2. A content management website (created and hosted by our friends from Internet Agentur beyond content GmbH) which includes the graphs created by PRTG
The remote probes for CloudClimate are installed on servers in selected hosting clouds:
  • Amazon EC2 US East Region (USA East Coast)
  • Amazon EC2 Europe West Region (Ireland)
  • GoGrid Cloud Servers (San Francisco CA)
  • NewServers.com (Miami FL)
To provide an additional perspective (without breaking the bank) we are running a number of probes on selected low-cost VPS servers around the globe, hosted by:
  • VPSLand (Atlanta GA)
  • HostEurope (Cologne DE)
  • webhosting.co.uk (London UK)
  • Usonyx (Singapore)
  • HostingPanama (Panama)
CloudClimate monitors the internal performance of cloud servers by running short load tests for CPU, memory and disks every 5 minutes. Additionally all probe systems (plus the VPS systems mentioned above) send HTTP and PING requests to each other every minute to measure network performance. The results are shown in the graphs on this website.

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