Are you up or down?

Let's face it, monitoring your website's uptime isn't a particularly interesting job but it is an important one. You should be in the know if your site goes down and for how long but you can bet your hosting company isn't going to make it their business to tell you. Luckily there are website monitoring services that send you an alert in the unlucky event that this happens.

What you need to know about monitoring

You'll need to keep an eye on your uptime. This is the amount of time the server your website is hosted on is available. You want this to be around 99% . Some hosting companies will guarantee 99% and over uptimes.

You also need to look at response time. This is the amount of time the server takes to respond to a request, giving an effective performance measure. This will be reported in milliseconds. Jakob Nielson, the usability expert, recommends response times be no longer than 1 second.

Monitoring services

We use a service called Pingdom which sends us an email alert whenever our site goes down and another email when it is back up. We can also login to our account and view a number of nifty reports. Here's the overview report, which you can make public. Pingdom recently began offering a free service for monitoring one website, you can sign up here.

Is it down or is it just me?

Sometimes you are not sure if a website is down or you are having connection problems. Now you can check any site's uptime with this handy tool.

Categories: Online tools

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