Somebody monitoring my domain?

Huh?

[jmorgan]

My logs show somebody using a ping service to monitor my domain. I was thinking that's a little strange. Why would somebody be doing that? Are they waiting to see if they can grab my domain when it expires or something?

[jtara]

Are you sure it isn't your web hosting provider? Many do this routinely so that they can be alerted to any trouble requiring their attention.

Ping isn't useful for determining if a domain registration is expired.

If not your hosting provider, anyone who has some reason (or no reason) for monitoring the health of the Internet, parts of the Internet, specific routes, etc. may have just chosen your site as representative and added it to an automated check.

There are also websites that monitor the reliability of hosting providers to help webmasters select a reliable host. Perhaps one of these services has selected your site as representative of your hosting provider.

Maybe you have users who are so dependant on your site that they would just go slit their wrists if your site ever went down. In this case, you should be happy, but please make sure your site never goes down for longer than the period between pings.

In any case, I doubt this is anything to be very concerned about.