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One of the key requirements when choosing a web host is ensuring that your site is always accessible.  As I have my own account with Tsohost and I also offer clients I build websites for the option to signup for their own accounts (I encourage small businesses to retain control of their domain names and I like to be transparent about the true cost of the hosting).  With multiple accounts and sites hosted having a central place to monitor the uptime of each site is a must.  I will be using a service I have used before and its also free:

 

Uptime Robot

 

UptimeRobotWith a free service offering up to 50 sites to be monitored and checked every 5 minutes (or longer if you prefer) this is a great service and I will be using it to monitor all my sites with Tsohost.  The free account also keeps 2 months worth of logs which will suite my purposes.  A paid plan is also available  at $4.50 per month (billed annually, $5.50 if billed monthly) which increases the monitoring intervals to every minute, logs are kept for a year and you also get 10 SMS credits.

 

How it works

 

Once logged into your account dashboard you have the option to add a new monitor.   There are four monitor types available:

http(s): This works in the same way as a visitor would browsing your website.  Your browser sends a request to the url and the server returns a 200 success code if the request was successful or a 404 not found code if not.  An alert is triggered if an unsuccessful response is returned.

Ping: This is used to check if the server hosting the site responds by pinging its IP address. However a server can respond as up but the site could be down due to an internal error so this is not a suitable method for monitoring websites.

Keyword: This methods checks to see if a keyword exits on a site and is the method I prefer to use.  A website could still be up (200 success code returned) but due to a coding or plugin error the content is not being pulled from the database correctly.  For me by checking for a keyword I know that the site has been returned correctly to the visitor and I am also recording the speed at which it was returned which is important from the user experience.

Port: This is used to monitor non website services such as smtp, pop etc.

Once you have chosen the type of monitor you wish to use you can select the interval at which you want the site checked, the shortest frequency is every 5 minutes on a free account up to 120 minutes if you feel you are getting too many alerts.  For my monitoring purposes I also use the shortest interval.

There are no SMS alerts with the free account but you can set up email alerts which is absolutely fine particularly if you select an email account you pick up on your smart phone.

 

The Dashboard

 

Uptime Robot Dashboard

 

The dashboard gives you an overview of all the sites you are currently monitoring and a list of the most recent alerts.  You can drill down on individual sites and view response time graphs for the last 24 hours which for me are important because if the site loads slow for visitors they are not going to stick around.

 

Advantages of using a 3rd party monitoring service

 

I will use Uptime Robot to monitor all the sites I have with Tsohost this will enable me to identify and address problems quickly before the website owners experience them and provide additional evidence when contacting support.  Using a 3rd party provider is useful as you can sometime get issues which are local to your machine or ISP, as Uptime Robot will be using a different network to access the site this can help you combat the ‘I can’t see any problems at our end’ response from support.

I will attempt to update this blog with any Tsohost uptime issues as and when they occur.