Website Monitoring Services
One of the worst feelings in the world is to go to your website to find that your website is down. With shared hosting this can happen quite frequently and all too often you will not be told why or when it even happened. Many times it is caused by “security updates” or “fixes” on your server. This can be very frustrating and can ruin your day, especially if you depend on your website to pay the bills like I do.
There are many website monitoring services out there to help you keep an eye on your sites uptime and load times. Some monitoring services are better than others, but they are all better than nothing. Free website monitoring services usually offer a simple ping service that checks to see if your site is online. The frequency is usually around one hour for free site monitoring accounts. To get multiple sites or more frequent checks you usually have to upgrade to a paid website monitoring service.
Here is an example of a paid website monitoring service called Atwatch. I signed up for their paid monitoring service and they sent me weekly status reports like the one above to show me what was really going on with my website. Notice the graph shows that on certain days the connect time was much slower than average. Although the site was never down there were a few performance problems that could be addressed. I have since cancelled my Atwatch account because I found it to be too expensive ($500/year).
Currently I am using a company called SiteUptime for my website monitoring service. They offer free accounts for basic checkups on one domain. But, I chose to upgrade to their Premium Plan so I could get more frequent checks on my 3 most important websites. The cost for 3 websites is only $48/year with SiteUptime. Which is a lot easier to swallow than the $500/year I was paying.
One common mistake that people make. They send their alert notices to the email address which is hosted on the domain being monitored. This can be a big problem since most alerts are sent via email, and if your site is down your email probably is too. Be sure to use a gmail account or an email account hosted on a different server. You can also choose to recieve text alert notices to your cell phone with some paid monitoring services.
Remember, any monitoring service is better than nothing at all. Signup for the free monitoring service from SiteUptime.com and see what you think of their service. So far, I have been very pleased with their services.
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