We hate this: A website which doesn’t load. What if this is our own website?

There are many reasons for an websites outage, the following problems are very common:

• Server, network or DNS problems
• The limited web space in your shared hosting account is totally used and the database can’t store any more records and became corrupt
• Errors in your website or application

So what if you have one of the problems and you don’t know about for days? Sure often you will notice a downtime in changed income as an ad publisher or because Google Analytics shows less visitors. A better solution is to use a website monitoring service. Since there are many companies offering their services it’s up to the webmaster which one is the best.Here are a few tips based on my own experience:

Don’t try (free) services from companies/websites where monitoring is not one of the core business. Every owner of a web server is able to run CRON jobs which will check your website once in a while. Those services are mostly very limited: only one website for each account, no other tests than monitor a website (port 80), no off-line warning via SMS… Sure this kind of monitoring services are nice offers most of all if they are free, but your website deserve more.

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