Web site monitoring. Can you afford downtime?

Supposing that you’ve gone that long way through from choosing the right hosting provider to final files uploading to your brand new server you proceed with setting up million other things like permissions, nameservers, email and ftp accounts but some people forget about just one thing which is also one of the most important things after they launched their websites or online business. This is your website uptime and availability. It is not enough to verify daily if your website is up. To be really certain that your website is accessible most of the time, you should monitor server uptime in a serious manner.

That’s where remote web site monitoring service comes into play. The service is simple and doesn’t need any technical skills to set up. It also doesn’t require any software installation. All you need to do is register for a free monitoring account and the service will start checking your website immediately every 60, 30, 15, 10, 5, 3, 1 minute and instantly alert you via email and sms about any website downtime and outage.

The way system checks your site is almost the same as if you personally would come to your web site to check that it is responding and returns proper content. As every simple thing gets complicated easily there is much more than just web page monitoring to verify that your server is up and fully functional. You should also know there are many other ports/services on the server that should be checked. HTTP monitoring – to make sure your website is accessible and returns proper content. SMTP, POP3, IMAP – to check your mail servers. MySQL monitoring for database connections check. HTTP/SSL monitoring – secure hosts. DNS/NS Lookup monitoring to verify that your domain resolves to proper IP and server. Complete list of monitoring ports/services is available at ServiceUptime website.

A main advantage of remote monitoring service is that such service monitor uptime using more that a single server but has many locations in different parts of the world, located in different networks, excluding the issue when website is inaccessible from one certain network or because of one particular ISP. The system will also verify when your website goes down from multiple locations to avoid any false alerts. If more than 2 worldwide locations report unavailability that’s a firm indication of server being down or experiencing problems that you should be aware about and take appropriate measures before your customers start contacting you about this.

You can start from a free monitoring service as it allows checking your website every 30 minutes free and has no limitations to ports/services monitored. It also has sms notifications available for free accounts. The service has been ranked number one monitoring service at Undertesting.com and is widely used for websites, servers, routers, pages, links, ports monitoring. Other monitoring service providers are also reviewed at Undertesting review website.

ServiceUptime goes further and not only alerts you but stores all uptime statistics. This is available in Users’s Control Panel. The statistics is never deleted so you may see daily, weekly, monthly, yearly uptime statistics and average response time for any period. There is also an option to show your uptime statistics to your users.

5 main questions about monitoring service.

1. Is there free service or trial period (usually 15-30 days trial. ServiceUptime gives free lifetime account).
2. What ways of notifications available (email, sms, messengers).
3. Check frequency/interval (usually from 60 to ever 1 minute).
4. Monitoring services/ports (HTTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, FTP, DNS, MySQL, Ping, etc).
5. Additional features (public statistics, maintenance schedules, etc).

Remember, even 10 minutes of downtime daily may affect your online venture in a strong way. Lost revenue and bad reputation is the result of downtime. Whatever you do, monitor your website’s uptime. It’s good to know if your website is up and verify if the host is providing a good service.