Good Morning Theo,
All good web hosting companies guarantee at least “99% uptime”. But what exactly does that mean in real terms?
Simply put, ‘up time’ is how long your website is ‘up’ and available to the public through the internet. 995 refers to AT LEAST 99% of the time.
There are a couple of ways to monitor this.
(1) Keep visiting your website on a regular basis and go into panic when it’s not there.
(2) Use a 3rd party service and have them send you notifications if the site becomes unavailable.
Here’s my latest monthly report -
(and yes, I get instant notifications also)
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www.paulbarrs.com
Service: PaulBarrs.com
Outages: 2
Downtime: 3 hrs, 0 mins
Uptime: 99.59%
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Notice that I had two ‘down times’ on my site this past month; I think that makes about 5 now for the entire year.
But what do I DO with that information...?
Nothing. It’s a computer, I understand that sometimes it won’t be there – and it’s only the 2nd time this year; even the giants go down sometimes. Although I’ll admit that 3 hours between them is a little longer than usual.
The thing is this – just because I may not be able to access my site doesn’t mean that it’s not there available to others. There are dozens of reasons why someone may not be able to access a website. Not being able to access a website and it not being available to others are two very different things.
So, in summary; there are two things that you should be monitoring on your website for availability -
(1) Your site’s “uptime”. I use http://www.siteuptime.com/ to do this.
(2) Your website’s “crawl-ability”, the ability for the major search engines to be able to access your site. We’ll talk about this at another time, but you can find the report in Google’s Webmaster Tools, and set it up that it emails you with any downtime notifications.
Between the two of them, that’s got everything important covered.
It’s good to have the doors open :)
- Paul
PS. One last tip; if you use the monitoring service, use a different email to the domains that you’re monitoring, otherwise you may not get the emails either!
My Goal is simple - to help you achieve *yours* online :)
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