Once you have grown your traffic to a fairly decent amount, however, downtimes that affect your site are a complete different story, a nuisance that can mean that hundreds of people are unable to get to your site, most of whom are likely to never come back again. In my experience, even when my hosting company promised 99.8% uptime, this began to increasingly seem like meaningless marketing hype when I started getting emails from friends and strangers alike informing me that my site was down at such and such an hour (many of which downtimes occurred in the early am hours when I wouldn’t have been online anyway).

I also noticed that the net effect of this was that I was becoming a bit paranoid; if my traffic seemed lower than it usually is I immediately wondered if me site had been down. I started looking for a resource that would monitor my site for downtimes and inform me automatically so I didn’t have to spend time wondering about it. This is when I found Montastic.

Montastic is a very simple service: create an account then enter in the URLs of the sites you would like it to monitor (up to a limit of 100 sites). It will then check the sites on your list within 10 minute intervals and from 2 locations. If and when it detects that any of the sites are down, it will immediately report this by email or through RSS. Once the site is back up it will report that as well.

What’s interesting about Montastic is that you are not limited to just your sites. After listing my 3 websites I decided to include 2 blogs that are similar to my main blog just for benchmarking purposes. To my surprise I discovered that while my site went down for about 2 hours once this week, these other sites seemed to be down for a few hours at least every other day, which was interesting to know, and made me think that perhaps my hosting company isn’t so bad after all.

Montastic was created by a team of “open source fanatics” that developed it for their own use and decided to make it available to everyone as a 100% free service.

Currently the site is still in the early stages and the range of (DRM-free) mp3s available for download is still quite small (I counted 8 artists and 19 tracks, but I guess you have to start somewhere).

If you’re looking to get your music distributed be sure to check them out; part of We7’s vision is to showcase new musical talent (Oh and by the way, We7 artists get paid).

The answer to this question for some blogging platforms might come in the form of a "contact form" plugin, but what if your particular platform does not support one, or the contact form for whatever reason does not work as you intended?. For me, the answer lay in simply re-writing my email in a non-email format (e.g. myname[at]mydomain.com) — until I found Emailcloaker, that is.

Emailcloaker consists of a freeware program that will generate html code to display your (clickable) email address in a cloaked format unreadable by the spiders. Clicking on this link will open a contact form hosted by Xinbox.com (the makers of Emailcloaker) that is ad-free and offers a number of customizable features such as a verification code and the ability to send an attachment up to 500k. Other options you can choose from are whether or not you want to show your name and/or email in the web form, whether or not to require the sender to enter an email address, and whether or not to add a label (such as “NOSPAM”) to the subject of all emails sent from the service. To see this email form in action, click here.