Sometimes you cannot tell how serious the alert is. KnightGuard.Net will tell you when it can't reach your server, but it can't tell you why. You may need to do some research. You may need to get on-line yourself and surf your site. You may need to call your provider to see what may have happened. Sometimes you may never know why your site was down.

However, we feel that the more you know, the better prepared you will be when the time comes. To help you determine the severity of the outage, we've divided reasons you may be alerted into three basic categories: Green, Yellow, and Red alerts:

Green Alerts are OK. They are a result of a momentary interruption in services, and are characterized by a single KnightGuard.Net alert. The outage may have been planned or cause by a forced reset of a server, router, or program. In these cases, there's probably someone already aware of the problem and it will be resolved quickly.

Yellow Alerts are cause for concern. Yellow alerts are characterized by two or more consecutive alerts. If you receive even two consecutive alerts, the problem is no longer momentary. There's a good chance that people have not been able to surf your site for 15-30 minutes already, and you need to check it out.

Red Alerts are serious outages. If you receive more than 4 consecutive alerts, your server has been unavailable for an hour. Unless this is a scheduled outage (you'll have to check with your tech support group to find out), you need to know what's going on.

Of course, we always recommend checking things out for yourself before taking action or calling for technical support. If you need to call, you'll want to give a more complete description of the problem so appropriate action may be taken by the technical support staff.