Why and How to Track the Website Uptime?
While searching for a reliable web host you would definitely come across the term “uptime” and all types of guarantees surrounding it. But to tell you more about the ways to track this essential component, we have to first of tell you about this term.
What is Uptime and Downtime?
In the web hosting world Uptime refers to the amount of time that the website is running and available to the visitors. When the website is unaccessible, due to back-end issues, it suffers Downtime. Downtimes can be frustrating for you as a website owner, as the surfers are not able to reach your website. This could lead to loss of traffic and revenue. Additionally, statistics suggest that surfers who are not able to access a website first time around tend not to return back ever again! So, any web host you contact would assure a maximum uptime for the website (often a 99.9% uptime guarantee), which means your website will be accessible for most time of a day.
Why you need to track for uptime?
There are many practical reasons for constantly monitoring your website’s uptime. First of all, tracking of the uptime helps you measure the performance of the web host. Secondly, you are the first to know when the website is down. You can quickly contact the web host and get the website back live without losing too much of traffic in the meanwhile. Fast response is critical
when your website is suffering a downtime! Thirdly, no matter how much trust you have upon the web host, you need to take a proactive stance about your online presence. The web host might be handling multiple clients, but for you the website is your sole discretion. Fourthly, tracking for uptime helps you make a good decision when your web hosting plan comes up for renewal.
How Frequently do you need to monitor the uptime?
Being proactive does not mean you have to monitor the uptime of your website after every 5 minutes or so. There are many web tools to auto-check your website’s uptime. You just need to know about them and more importantly use them.
What are the options?
There are dozens of server monitoring tools available online. While some are free, others would cost you. Some simple tools cost you a small amount while the other sophisticated versions can cost you a fair deal. While simpler tools run HTTP check to ensure whether the website is running or down, there are others which perform more complex back-end jobs. Yes, the sophisticated tools can monitor more than 50 server side checkpoints simultaneously. Some of the free monitoring tools would include Pingdom, Uptime Robot and Uptime Checker among many others. While the costly and sophisticated monitoring tools include Cacti, Naios, etc. No matter which monitoring tool you choose they will perform one of the four types of server monitoring: HTTP monitor, Ping monitor, DNS Server Monitor and TCP port monitor.
If you are in search for a reliable web hosting partner who offers best uptime for your website, then OptraHost’s web hosting services is the right match for your requirements.