Do you know when your site is down?

Here at 79DESIGN we occasionally get reports from clients that their website might have issues.  Be it because of their domain having expired, or ever that they ran an update on their site, and it crashed it – making it unusable.

We recently had cause to action such a request, and it was related to a hosting company causing all manner of issues – the result was their core website was down for nearly 5 days.  This triggered this news article on the topic, and our service we can offer.

For whatever reason, things happen, and it’s always at the worst possible time.

All websites should be hosted and remain live – it’s normal and what we expect.  But there are times when a website can crash for a myriad of unexpected reasons.

Uptime Monitoring your website – insurance for your business

So what do we do to help, and how do we know if your website is down?  It’s a service called Website Uptime Monitoring.  It’s a kind of Insurance Policy.

Ordinarily, your site runs fine.  No issues; that is what we all expect.  But we can have a monitor on your server, specifically assigned to your website.  This monitor pings your site regularly.  It doesn’t load it, nor does it count as a ‘hit’.  It simply says “are you there?”, and if a ping comes back, it knows it is and all is fine.

Oooops no ping – site down!

This system sends us a message within 5 minutes to warn us that the website didn’t respond.  Sometimes we check it straight away, sometimes we give it 5 and if it pings us again, we jump on it.  We check to a) see if the site is in fact live (it usually is, and it’s a ‘blip’), if it is down, b) we checked the server.  Can we access it.  If we cannot, then we contact our hosting partners as something serious has occurred.

We access the site via an IP, so if that is inaccessible, it is something very serious; more than just a domain name expiry.
This is where we start to take various action methods – and this is what you pay each month for – the insurance for us to spend time to resolve things.

It might never happen – but if it does, we are here before you know it!
If you are keen to learn more about this for your website, if you have had website hosting issues and need help to ensure it stays up – or you just want that insurance knowing it IS up.  Note this is not about speed of a website.  This service is for sites that do not load for whatever reason.  It’s often down to a cheap hosting package, because you are on a server with 100s of other websites.  If they have a surge, it can cause yours not to respond, thus pinging a signal to us that it is ‘not responding’.

It may require an improved hosting service.  We can even migrate it to our platform, and provide the hosting and monitoring all for one excellent price.  You then have much more confidence in your website.

If you are interested in this for your website, contact us today on the number at the top of the screen, livechat, or this form.  We will respond very quickly.