Most Internet users rely heavily on Google. They use Google to search, Google Mail for emails, Google Reader for feed reading, Google Adsense or Adwords in their business and various other Google services. That got me thinking about the consequences of a Google downtime. What would you do if Google went down completely for a [...]
Check, Log and React on Website Downtimes
A rule of thumb is that websites or servers go down in an inappropriate moment either when you are sleeping, at work or in another location where you cannot check if your website or server is still up and running. A website that is not available for eight ore more consecutive hours can do serious harm to its reputation and possible revenue that is generated.
Monitor your website with Montastic
When you first start a blog and you’re slowly building your audience and your traffic, your site’s uptime/availability is not something that you often think about. When your audience is still small and your blog is down for one or two or even ten hours it really doesn’t matter that much, as the potential number of people who might have tried to visit and failed is small, and most of them at that point are friends or are somehow connected to you and will likely come back again.
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).
