Websites only need one unique selling point to make them incredibly attractive if you look at them as a product. It’s really simple – websites are always accessible. Unlike your on-site store, which likely has a closing time, your online store allows people to shop around the clock. Do you have a job? The business website can be a business card or flyer that you never need to hand out. How about a magazine? Never again will you have to worry about distribution with online magazines – your audience will come to this. Websites will always be there, waiting.
But will they still be? Are websites really always up?? We know from the average netizen experience that no, their website is not always open. While this is frustrating as it can send the average user to another online search for another website that offers what they’re looking for, it’s an exponentially bigger problem for the website owner. Hence, WordPress website uptime monitoring.
In this article we will explain:
If you are an internet user or a website visitor, server uptime is not that important to you. Maybe if you’re playing online games, but that’s usually it. It should be so because it is the job of the website owner or administrator to keep the website working properly. If you, as a user, notice that the website is down, you can usually navigate to a different website and find the one you want.
Look at it from a different angle and every minute a website is down could be making money for its owner. Imagine how much money a large e-commerce company would lose if their website crashed during a big sales event? Downtime can cost money, and the more money the website usually makes, the bigger the loss.
The damage goes deeper than the sudden blow to income. If a website is down too much, people will stop showing up. Whatever reputation the owner wants to develop for his website, it will also suffer from frequent interruptions. And not only viewers, but search engines will not like it.
Website hosting service providers will have at least maintenance downtime. No one can guarantee 100% uptime, at least not any reputable provider. However, you may experience additional problems due to poor service. Shared hosting and traffic spikes often cause problems to multiple websites sharing the server, so the type of service may also play a role. But the real reason you should monitor server uptime is because the server will crash and you will need to know about it.
Let’s say you have a website and you want to start monitoring server uptime. You can’t stop by every now and then to see it’s there and invoke the uptime monitoring of this server. Not that you shouldn’t be visiting your website regularly – You should do this for no other reason than to see it from the visitors’ perspective.
For monitoring, you’ll need a service that will notice when something happens – whenever it happens – and notify you about it. Most often, this means a paid service. However, a good way to simplify and check things out would be to find service providers that offer free trials or limited free plans.
one of the most popular Working TimeRobot. With them, you can sign up for their free service and monitor up to fifty assets at five-minute intervals.
The service you get with the free plan will also be limited in other ways. – you will not receive any SMS alerts, you will have a status page and you only have 2 months retention period for logs. But you will get HTTP(s), response time, ping and port monitoring.
To begin the service, you must go through the free registration process. It lives up to its call-to-action to 30-second promises. After confirming your email address, you will be taken to your account control panel where you can add new monitors. In the upper right corner you will see the “+Add New Monitor” button. Click on it to get started.
The first thing you need to choose is the monitor type. You can choose from HTTP(s), keyword, ping and port.
Selecting the type will change the fields you need to fill in later, however, these usually involve naming the monitor, providing the URL, IP, port or keyword, and choosing the monitoring range. – not less than five minutes.
You have to choose how many people you want to notify – In the free version, you choose whether you want to receive the email or just check-in from the control panel.
When you add a monitor, it will appear in the Quick Statistics window. You will be able to see how many monitors are on, how many are off, and how many are paused. You will also get some statistics and latest events for all monitors.
On the left side of the panel you will see a list of monitors where you can click on the monitor for more detailed information.
And that’s as far as the free version will get you – pretty far for a free service. The Pro plan, which offers more features, costs $15, but is usually on sale if you like the taste.
Using a good monitoring service is a pretty reliable way to find out when your website is down. Your first reaction should be to consult your hosting provider for any notice of maintenance or recent issues. Everything from hardware failure to cyber attacks can cause service interruption.
If you find your website not working when you visit it, you can do a few things:
The next step would be to contact your hosting provider and report the problem to them. It’s also where you’ll learn why it’s important to research a hosting provider’s support before signing up – Waiting for a response with your website down can be very frustrating.
Let’s wrap it up!
You should always do whatever is up to you to make sure your website is up and running. This means doing nothing to break it, but also being careful when choosing a hosting provider.
WordPress website uptime monitoring is an effective way to keep an eye on the services and the people responsible for keeping your website up and running. If something goes wrong and you notice unplanned outages, you’ll know who to pressure to fix the problem. Or if that doesn’t work, you’ll know you have to look for another hosting provider.
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