Website Monitoring is NOT Provided by Your Web Hosting Company

Posted on March 27, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized, website monitor |

Many people don’t realize that if their website goes down, normally no one from the hosting will call them to let them know about it. In fact, many times I have alerted a web hosting company of a server error before they even knew about it.

So what’s the best way to monitor whether or not your site is up? First, let me start with how “not” to do it:

1. Manually checking the site every day. While this is better than nothing, it leaves lots of room for downtime, taking away from the benefit of having a virtual sales rep 24/7.

2. Waiting for someone to contact you to tell you that they can’t reach your site. Chances are they won’t, unless they know you and that means losing customers.

3. Pay a company lots of money to do it for you. Why not? Because you don’t have to. Now, the caveat here is if you have a site that brings in a lot of money, you obviously need to take additional measures to keep it going. I used to work on a web support team that hosted large websites such as American Airlines an Saks Fifth Avenue. Without disclosing pricing, let’s just say there were at least three operations engineers in the NOC (network operations center) at all times - 24×7x365.

so what “should” you do? There are several services out there that will perform these checks for you, and send you a message if they do not get a response from the site. They are not infallible, but for the most part do a great job. Currently, I use Site Uptime, and I have it monitor, not only the website, but also the mail servers. If there is a glitch, I get a page via text message, as well as emails at multiple addresses to ensure that I see it as soon as possible.

Site Uptime offers a free monitoring plan, but I recommend upgrading to at least the $5 per month plan because you get a few more valuable features.

Happy Hosting!

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Comments

2 Responses to “Website Monitoring is NOT Provided by Your Web Hosting Company”

  1. Joe Cheray on March 28th, 2008 6:20 pm

    I actually do use Site Uptime for one of my web sites and every week I get a report the free version is very good. I will consider upgrading to the plan sometime soon. Can you tell me what the difference is between the free and the upgrade?

  2. hostguy on March 29th, 2008 8:05 am

    The differences that were important to me are:

    1. You are allowed more monitors (the free service only gives you one) and I run monitors on the web server, POP server, and SMTP server.

    2. The system will check your site more frequently on the paid service which further reduces down time.

    Here is the full comparison chart from their site:
    http://www.siteuptime.com/compare.php

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