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:

  • 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)

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.

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