Monitoring your website uptime is necessary. It means less time for visitors to see what you have to offer, and even losing advertisers.
Downtime can be caused by any of the following:
- The server is simply down or the network it is on is down.
- Improper configuration of your web host’s server.
- Improper configuration of your domain’s nameservers.
- If you are using any type of script like PHP, you may have an error or the script may have stop functioning.
- Denial of Service Attacks (DDOS)
- You are using too many data resources allotted to your web host account. This is most common in shared clients, reseller hosting, and VPS hosting.
Again, these are just a few examples. It is not always the web host’s fault if you are down. If you are a shared client with your web host, you are only given so many data resources that can be called on. If you are using a content management system much like WordPress, every time a person visits a page, fills out a form, or comments, using some other function that is made possible by a plugin that saves its data to the database, then your visitors are triggering those data resources.
Not all web hosts are up front about their limited data resources and often you will be sold packages that are beyond the specs for the data resources allotted.
Why Monitoring Your Website Uptime Is Necessary
Extensive downtime is noticeable to your site’s visitors. They may become impatient and never come back again. You might lose subscribers. You might lose advertisers. If you are a website owner focused on rank and numbers, those will go down and its not always easy to gain that rank or those numbers back quickly.
The biggest thing with website owners is losing their return on investment (ROI.) If your site is not up, your product or service is not available to be seen. In the case of busy sites that have regular or many new customers, this is a definite loss of money. And that is bad!
How to Monitor Your Website’s Uptime
As for monitoring your website’s uptime, you will need to keep an eye on that. Sometimes you can sign up for free services like Pingdom’s DNS check tool and they will monitor it for you. When your site is down, they can alert you via email or by text to your cell phone. Again, it is free to sign up and use.
As said earlier, your website can be down for both user reasons, or the server’s health. If you are noticing extensive downtime, let your web host know immediately. If you are using their support, don’t submit a regular ticket, use their live chat support instead for faster help. You are a customer and your web host has offered that type of support as an option, so use it. It’s not a bother for them as the support is paid to help you. AND if you’re not satisfied with your first support contact’s answers, ask them to escalate your issue to someone more knowledgeable.
If your web host is saying that you are using more data resources than allowed for your account, it may be necessary to find a bigger plan or a different host to accommodate you. Don’t be afraid to ask about your web hosting account’s data resource limitations. Yes, it may be frustrating, but its happens with a growing website… however, if you don’t know, its really your fault in the end for not asking.
Do you monitor your website’s uptime? What tools do you use?
It’s really important to monitor your website up-time. You don’t want that you put lot of efforts to drive relevant visitors on your website and they won’t be able to open it and feel frustrated or embarrassed. This is not a good situation for your business or blog.
Hi Nile
I have been monitoring my website using Pingdom’s free service for a long time. As you say it is free and I get an e-mail whenever my blog is unavailable. In addition I get a monthly uptime report that gives me a great overview of any issues and for how long my blog was down. I can also use this report if i am not happy with my hosts uptime overall.
Right now I’m pretty unhappy with the server issues with bluehost. Other than the disaster a week or two ago, the servers are normally up but it seems like my website takes an unusually long amount of time to load. I’m trying to figure out whether it is me running too much stuff on WP or the server.
We have prepared our own service in our country to monitor uptime of all of our webs. Also its essential for every blogger, because it’s the worst thing to lose visitors because of downtime.
It’s really important to monitor your website up-time.
Nice post Mam
Monitoring a website is really important . Monitoring a website helps in checking whether your website is down or not . This point is very useful for me .
Thanks for sharing this nice post
Very well said. Running a website involves responsibilities to make it work successfully. Therefore, proper monitoring and maintenance in website development are a must.
I have using hosting-bee and I have never face down time or any kind of server problem but its really a good information for webmasters
Monitoring website uptime is absolutely necessary considering the recent turn of events i’ve experienced. Due to the bandwidth / CPU Usage exceed problem, the web host disabled my site without even notifying.
Hi Nile,
Monitoring website uptime is absolutely necessary because uptime ratio is also considered in Google’s search algorithms.
Awesome and interesting article thanks for sharing keep it up 🙂
Thanks For This Tips Your Blog is Awesome
Pingdom is a great tool – always nice to resolve an argument with your ISP over downtime when you can give figures. Fortunately my site is sitting at 99.9% uptime!
I believe It’s really important to monitor your website up-time.
Hi Nile,
It’s not in Google’s interest to return unreliable results.
Google monitor the number of humans visiting your site, if its down for a long time when crawled, it’s going to be removed from the Google index.
you have a couple of days tops to fix it!
Many thanks and Best Regards.
I use Google free service blogger so i didn’t get any downtime issues with my blog.
i do not agree with mitch, Google won’t remove a site from index if it is down, once it is up it will be re index, i think we should use online tools to monitor website down time and that are free to use.
Hi Nile,
Thanks for sharing this. Before using a premium hosting, I was using Pingdom tool and that works pretty good with all those email notifications. Now, I am using Site Sensor monitor thanks to my premium hosting package.
Great write up and thanks for sharing this for us all!
Have a great weekend.
Monitoring a website is really important. Its an important point for the management of any website.
Thank you mam for posting this stuff. Got to know may Points about it.
Nice post Mam
Monitoring a website is really important . Monitoring a website helps in checking whether your website is down or not . This point is very useful for me .
Thanks for sharing this nice post
Nice blog post about monitoring your own website. As we know that we should monitor our website after some time because we will get to know where we are lacking. Nice blog post keep the good work going.