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.

Professional Website Monitoring Service

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

• Multi-Protocol Support like ping, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SSH, SMTP, DNS, POP3, IMAP, MySQL…
• Downtime Notification via email and SMS.
• Global Monitoring Locations.
• Uptime & Performance Reports
• Maintenance Scheduling
• support many languages (reports and e-mail messages)

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!Similar Posts:

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