Does your startup have a website, or rely on technology to service your customers?
What would it mean to you if your customers were getting error messages or nothing at all when they tried to visit your website?
It’s like not unlocking the front door of your shop, no one can come in and buy or look around.
Ok, so enough of the scare tactics, it’s easy fixed and you should do it right now.
Web monitoring is available as an online service just like most other things, and it’s easy to setup and use. It’s also free for basic use in a lot of cases.
Web monitoring simply checks your website at scheduled intervals for a valid response. If an invalid response is returned like a 404 – page not found (in fact all the 4xx and 5xx codes are not good, 2xx are the good ones, that’s what we want to see), then it will email or text you. For heavens sake don’t email the same domain your monitoring 🙂 pick another email account than your business one. If your website is down, chances are your mail, DNS or domain may be as well.
Here are a couple of choices I have used in the past.
• UptimeRobot
• Service Uptime
• Site Uptime
Once you have created your account, all you need to do is create a ‘monitor’ or robot that will check that your website is up. Your choices of monitor could be a http check for the correct return code, or a ping, or a keyword on your site. Choose a monitor interval, depending on how critical your site is to your business, and depending on the options you may pay for.
One of the benefits that you also get is a log of your response times over a period of time, and on some monitor sites, from a variety of global locations, this helps you work out some rudimentary performance stats.
So now you won’t be the last to know when your website is down.
