Domainers Do You Monitor Your Site For Uptime?

You’ve built an amazing site and within a week of building it you have been able to monetize it exactly how you planned.  Your google adsense and affiliate partner accounts are starting to reflect all the hours you spent developing the site.  The website you intricately took the time to build is working.  Now you can move onto the next project as you are confident that this developed domain will continue to trend upwards.

Another week goes by and your developer confidence has sky rocketed.  You decide to log into your affiliate partner accounts and notice that there is a large gray area which effected your earnings potential dramatically.  This can’t be real, there must be a glitch or a problem with the affiliate tracking software.  No, this is very real and it can happen to you!

Have you ever heard of the term, “police the police.”  Well in this case the police unit is your hosting provider and monitoring them is your legal duty!  I used this example because there are a number of domainers out there who simply TRUST that there hosting provider will have there best interest.  Well guess what?  You are a very small blip on your hosting provider’s radar and when your site goes down I can almost guarantee that unless you notice it your hosting provider will turn the other cheek.

Now I am not writing this blog entry to scare you.  My objective is to arm you with the write tools and information to make sure you are monitoring your online properties properly.  With that in mind, I also want to remind you that I have worked in the web hosting industry for years and have seen the unfathomable.  We’ll discuss that in a future blog entry!

What tool should you have in your domaining arsenal?  In walks pingdom.com!  This site is a life saver!  A few months ago while I was away from the computer, I received a text message saying that my blog was down.  At that time I had DNPimping.com hosted on a server which was running a proxy site.  To put it simply the server was running out of swap due to the popularity of the proxy site.  Since it was running out of virtual memory, apache would crash and along with it goes access to DNPimping.com!

Without that text message I would not of known that the server was down.  In addition to this I would not of been able to calculate the total downtime to notify my dedicated server provider with.  Most quality webhosting companies have an internal system to monitor uptime.  Again, I want to stress “police the police!”  Because I had my own monitoring service I was able to be proactive on resolving my problem.  Ultimately I decided to kill the proxy site, move my blog and cancel the dedicated server.  This process has saved me both time and money!

Pingdom.com is an uptime and performance monitoring service.  Best of all you can take advantage of this service for free.  The free account only allows you to monitor one website, hostname or ip.  For me this is all that I needed, the only website I am actively monitoring at the moment is my blog.

If you decide that you would like to upgrade your account to monitor multiple properties, the interface allows you to do so at the click of a button.  Email and SMS alerts make this service a no brainer for the average domainer.  (Hey that rhymed!)  Basic accounts start off at $9.95 a month and business accounts start off at $39.95 a month.  If you decide to sign up for the service, feel free to write a comment about it.

There are other uptime monitoring services and tools out there.  I have tried many of them and in my opinion this is one of the easiest to use and it flat out WORKS!

*I enjoy the service so much that I am in the process of joining their affiliate program.