June 21, 2012 / in Business Recommendations, General Information, Information Technology / by Jason Terry
It is a fact that your website will go down at some point every year. Do you know how often that happens? Think about the consequences of your website being down… a prospective client might pick that exact moment to go to your site. Error page. Ugh. A business friend might be trying to find information about your products or services to forward on to their referral. No dice, it’s down. Your social media posts that link to your blog article don’t work. Your visitor might be thinking, “Are they a trustworthy company if they can’t keep their own website running?” None of it is good, and most companies have no idea when or how often this happens.
If you have never heard of pingdom.com, you should check it out right now. It is an excellent web service that will monitor your web site for you 24/7. Pingdom will send you an email (or SMS text message if you prefer) when your site is down. Sign up for a free account by clicking the FREE SIGNUP in the lower right hand corner of the site. With a free account, you can monitor a single URL. I recommend you monitor the home page of your site. You can also set up how often Pingdom should check that URL (every 15 minutes is probably a good starting point.)
I set up bluegurus.com on this service about two years ago. I started noticing more and more downtime with our web site… an early warning system that our web hosting company was having technical problems and not getting them resolved. I was also able to run a quick report to see how often we had been down in the past year and it was HOURS. This was enough to make me move our web hosting to HostGator and we have been thrilled. In the last 30 days, our website was down one time for six minutes. Awesome.
The point of all this is that I might not have realized just how bad our previous web hosting was without a service like Pingdom.
Have you ever been to a web site and the home page takes forever to load? Nobody wants to stick around and wait for that… so check out your own homepage and see how you compare. Simply go to the tools section of Pingdom.com to run a free test on any web page on your site. The previous link will run the report on bluegurus.com and we currently get a grade of 84/100 and that our website is faster than 76% of all tested websites. (Yay) If you are a little geeky and want to see more info, be sure to click on the Page Analysis tab for all kinds of interesting metrics about what happened when the page loaded.
So go check out Pingdom.com and find out where you stand with your current web hosting company. If the results are good, then smile and move on knowing that your site is stable and available. If not, then work with your web developer, web host or marketing company to get the problems resolved!
Let us know in the comments below if this post was helpful!
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Blue Gurus is top notch in their field!
We have known and worked with Jason for more than 15 years. He has helped us design our website several times as technology has changed, keeping it fresh, current and easy to modify. His knowledge of the industry is incredible and he has a great way of sharing that information and educating others in a way that's understandable.
Cari Duffin
Owner of Midwest Aquatics Swim and Scuba
I know that Pingdom cannot give services for free. May be they just offer some trial version like many other companies do to attract new clients. I know Anturis (http://www.anturis.com) also gives free monitoring, but then the price is really much better.
http://downorjust.me is an alternative tool for website status checking.