Any online business, small or large, niche or broad, depends on its servers. If the site is not online, no visitors will come, no sales will be made, no content nor ads displayed. Even worse, downtime could give the impression that your site is gone and thus, users might be tempted to remove your site from their bookmarks or newsreaders. Without question, monitoring your servers health is vital.
You could do it yourself, open your browser and go to your site every 15 minutes. But you’d have very little time to sleep. Monitoring websites is something that can be perfectly automated, so why do a computer’s job? Many tools are available on the Internet, some are free and some are surprisingly expensive.
There are monitoring programs you can install on your own PC, but that means you have to leave it running 24/7. There are also online monitoring services. You give them your coordinates and they try to visit your site every 15 or 30 minutes.
I’m currently very happy with Mon.itor.Us, which is free and will monitor your site every 30 minutes from 3 different locations across the globe. You get a nice uptime graphic, e-mail alerts and, if you like, an RSS feed with downtime reports. If you want more options and site monitors, you can always go for the premium package, but I currently don’t have the need for it.
If you want more options, there’s a huge (huge!) list at Hongkiat. And while you’re there, don’t forget to check out the other great resources and helpful posts.
