My site was down. Luckily…

My site was down last Thursday for nearly 5 hours. The funny things were my domain was alive and pointing to the right IP and my server was up but yet I can’t view the page on any browser. But when I checked the port I noticed that all my ports were up except port 80 which is use for http request. That gave me a panicking situation for a while and for that reason I have to call my hosting provider (godaddy.com). As usual they manage to handle things efficiently. Their support team was friendly and that gave me a bit relieve.

But why was it down? How can there be any problem when you’re hosting with a big hoster like godaddy. It’s frustrating and can be very, very costly as it can cause irreparable damage to the opinions of the new clients or partners you were trying to impress.

But, when it comes to IT, nothing is 100% perfect. Having experienced in handling server farm with multi million dollars equipment, sometime I just can’t trust any machine. What most important is to know when it happen and how to quickly fix it with the best way.

In my case it was not that frustrating since I was well informed. My site monitoring service which I have activated long time back has done his job well, hence giving me ample timing to take the necessary action. My advise to you is to quickly get your site monitored. Nobody will know when things will happen, so better be prepared.

A good site monitoring service will minimize your downtime by sending instant notifications anytime a problem is detected. Through early intervention, restoration of services can be more rapid.

But it shouldn’t just stop at your web site. Your online business is more than just the home page. It should covers your email, FTP services and others as well.

I would recommend you to consider these aspects before deciding which service you should choose:

• A good monitoring service should be able to monitor most of these services:
  HTTP - Check your standard pages for a valid response code and that no unauthorized changes have been made. Service should monitor multiple pages
  HTTPS - Check your HTTPS service (secure pages if you have any)
  PING - Ping your web site server by name or IP address.
  SMTP - Establish a connection with your SMTP server (mail outgoing)
  POP3 - POP3 server monitoring (incoming mail)
  FTP - Monitor your FTP server with username and password to test file retrieval
• You’ll also need to use a service that can communicate any problems to you in a variety of ways. A good web site monitoring service will provide alerts via cell phone, email, IM (Messenger service such as Yahoo!)
• Another point to bear in mind when choosing a monitoring service is monitoring frequency. The more frequent your site is monitored, the better. This is especially the case if the problem is at your hosting service level and is complex. The faster you can inform your web host, the faster they can fix the problem.
• There’s no point in utilizing a monitoring service that only have servers checking your site from one geolocation i.e. US. Find a service that will check your site from multiple points around the globe - especially from where your target market originates.
• A good site monitoring service will not only report when your site becomes unavailable, but will also generate and archive reports that can be used when making a claim for credit with your web host.
• In most cases, implementing web site monitoring services only takes a few minutes and there is usually nothing needed to be installed on your site.
• Before spending any money, be sure to test out the client support service - ask a few pre-sales questions, even if they are only simple ones to help gauge the company’s own claims of how good they are! Poor customer support usually translates to a poor service overall.

These are some of well known Site Monitoring Service online. If anyone has any experience with these, or has other services you think I should try, kindly post a comment below. Thanks.

• SiteUpTime
• Dotcom-monitor
• Website Pulse
• Alertra
• Internetseer
• Hyperspin
• Webmetrics
• Host Tracker
• Siterecon
• Watch Mouse