Is your website is down? Know before your visitors do!

Posted by Olaf
August 22, 2008

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:

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.

Professional Website Monitoring Service

Since a while we work with a monitoring partner which offers these great features:

Check this list of monitoring features for more information and take a look on our demo account.

Website or server monitoring starts with $2 a month for a 15 minute check and sending an SMS is only $0.20. There are discounts if you have several websites.

Hint: If you have several similar websites on the same server, you don’t need to monitor all of them. One is more than enough. ;)

Who should use monitoring services?

Actually most of the website owners should think about monitoring. If you own a dedicated server, you should monitor at least all important port numbers (HTTP, FTP, SMTP, MySQL…). If you own a high traffic website you can monitor the site to get an idea about the load on different times a day.

Still not convinced?

Just sign up for a free account an try it right now. Nothing to install, no credit card needed, absolutely no risk!

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If you got a dedi, there’s usually a 5 mins monitoring :)

Comment by Vygantas on August 24, 2008 @ 1:32 am

yeah it depends on what you need and how stable your server and network is ;)

Comment by Olaf on August 24, 2008 @ 1:46 am

If your site is constantly down and your visitors can not access it on a consistent basis, you will lose subscribers, visitors, and possibly sales. Your site is useless if it is down most the time.

Comment by geetha on August 26, 2008 @ 10:24 pm

@geetha

if you website is down so often you need a better web hosting provider, a monitoring service will not help to reduce the down time.

Comment by Olaf on August 26, 2008 @ 10:48 pm

I guess offline SMS is useless for me for my websites are hosted in the US while I’m living in China ：）

Comment by Kurt on September 11, 2008 @ 12:42 am

@Kurt,

no it’s not :)
just imagine your site is down and you get the SMS at 10PM your time.
The monitor service never sleeps. It depends on the hosting company and what kind of service you have. In case of an dedicated server you got often a remote power switch. You can try the SMS service via the this page:
http://monitor.finalwebsites.com/notification.php

Comment by Olaf on September 11, 2008 @ 12:53 am

I have to agree. It can be a big letdown if only your customers let you know your site is not working. And i guess, if you are monitoring your site on a regular basis that shouldn’t be a problem.

Comment by Designers on September 18, 2008 @ 1:49 pm

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