How could that happen?

One of the web sites I work with went down over the weekend. In this case nothing crashed, there was no denial of service or other sinister activity, it was just a combination of bad service from my hosting provider and bad luck by the owner of the site (the details behind this are for another day or maybe never).

What this outage reminded me of is that despite the best of intentions and controls sometime things combine to cause an outage. So after my experience this weekend, I wanted to write about monitoring your website so if all else fails you will at least know when your site is down.

In my corporate world job we have a lot of tools that monitor servers, networks and applications and while they do the job they do tend to do so in an overlapping patchwork manner.

In the SMB world, it is simply not feasible to deploy this kind of enterprise strength set of tools (read, way too much money). Instead we are left to create our own safety net to ensure our websites remain functioning at all times.

It is certainly possible to build your own scripts to check your site and create notifications if the results are not what you are expecting. On the other hand there are a number of "cloud" based services that will do all this for you for free or at a very reasonable cost.

Based on my corporate experience, I am employing the cloud based services from Dotcom-Monitor. Their initial tier of services is affordable for even the smallest business.

This monitoring service does an http request of your website at frequency intervals you select and can check the resulting page for the presence or lack there of a text field or fields. If the site does not come up or it does not look as you are expecting it can send out notifications via any number of methods from email to phone calls and pretty much everything in between.

Now I am sure some of you may be asking why I don't use the tools provided by the company hosting the site and the answer is twofold - One is that in the event the hosting company has issues, their monitoring tools may not be in position to tell you of the issue and secondly, Dotcom-Monitor's tools are just better then what I have seen from most of the hosting companies. So while monitoring your website, by itself can't prevent the site from going down, it will give you fast notification of the issue(s) and having a simple and efficient way to do this is key to time and cash strapped small businesses.

It should be noted that this is not an ad for DOTCOM-Monitor, I am simply a happy client, and have been for around 7 years. Whatever tool you use is up to you, but having something that checks your site's availability, so when that event or combination of events happens, you will be aware of what is happening and be in position to do something about it, which is something you need to make happen.