If you are running a website for a living, one thing is super expensive than everything else. Do you know what that is? Well, that is the uptime of your site.
Well, that would sound silly. Why is the uptime of your website so costly?
What Is Website Uptime?
In a simple word, uptime is a machine application term when a computer is operational. Website uptime is when a website or web service is available to the users over a given time.
So, if your website is accessible to you and others, then your site is Up. If you can’t access it, then the website is Down. Downtime is just the opposite of uptime.
Although 100% uptime is every service provider’s goal, the industry considers 99.999% uptime as high availability.
Every website experiences downtime planned or unplanned. All service providers want to keep uptime as high as possible and reasonably fit with the internet’s competing nature.
Why Is Uptime of Your Website So Costly?
Website downtime can be very high-priced concerning your bottom line revenue, brand reputation, and search engine visibility.
The web usually is where most businesses face the majority of their customers and generate their business income.
Imagine you run an e-commerce website, and it goes down often. It is like you close your offline shop for no reason. And the outcome would be a massive loss for your store. After all, no sale means no revenue.
Why Any Websites Go Down?
There are many possible causes for a website to go down.
Traffic Spikes
Probably the number one cause of websites going down is sudden spikes in traffic. As an example, you ran an ad campaign to generate more sales for the Diwali season.
As your ad campaign attracts more visitors to your website, these sudden traffic spikes may make your site down.
A reliable hosting provider like Rovity has the assured uptime even in such situations is the only way you can keep your site up and running smoothly.
Scheduled Maintenance
Even websites with great optimization strategies need scheduling maintenance from time to time. Carrying regular updates should follow during off-peak hours to decrease its possible negative impact.
Cyber Attacks
Cybercriminals can bring a website or an entire server down in different ways. They can burden the servers with initiating a DDoS attack, inject malicious code into your site, etc.
Under such cases, the website owners may shut off the site to reduce the damage and solve it as quickly as possible.
Website’s Code
Weak programming can cause an unnecessarily heavy load on servers. Even if your WordPress website is well optimized, one poorly written plugin can make various database errors and ultimately make the site unresponsive.
Data Center Problems
If your hosting provider is not a reliable service provider, it can be a headache for your website’s uptime.
Prominently, in this case, website uptime monitoring tools come in handy because they allow you to judge how reliable your web hosting company is.
So, now you want to keep an eye on your site performance? Or maybe you want to see if you are getting that 99.999% uptime as your web hosting provider promised or advertised?
That’s where website monitoring services can come in handy. But uptime services are expensive, though there are some free tools with minimal options alike. They will only monitor your website for a long duration, like once in thirty minutes.
Here we will help you to set-up a FREE Uptime Monitor to monitor your website in less than thirty seconds.
Uptime Robot – Free Uptime Monitoring for Websites
Uptime Robot is all about helping you to keep your websites up.
It monitors your websites every 5 minutes and alerts you if your sites are down with their FREE plan. You can monitor up to 50 websites with a single free account.
They have a Pro plan where you can have 1-minute monitoring intervals and additional features like 12 months of logs, SMS alert, etc.
Let’s sign up with Uptime Robot and start monitoring your website.
After you signed up, you will be redirected to Uptime Robot’s easy to use dashboard. Here click on the Add New Monitor button.
In the New Monitor set-up popup, you will have to input the necessary details about your website.
Monitor Type: HTTP(s)
Friendly Name: Friendly Name is to help you to identify any monitors. Useful if you have multiple websites for your blog, e-commerce store, personal portfolio, etc.
URL (or IP): Input your URL here.
Monitoring Interval: Leave the slider as default. It will monitor your website every 5 minutes.
Select the checkbox against your email address under the Select “Alert Contacts To Notify” section. This email would be the notification channel for your website uptime events.
Now click the Create Monitor button and close the pop-up window.
Uptime Robot will start monitoring your website or all the sites added to your account instantly. If Uptime Robot finds a downtime signal, it will send you an email alert and details such as the domain name and the reason behind the connection issue.
Uptime Robot will send another email as soon as your domain is back online with your website’s total downtime so far during the event.
If you click the little gear icon on the right side, you can Pause, Edit, Delete, or Reset the monitoring domain’s Stats.
Uptime Robot Public Status Pages
Uptime Robot is robust, reliable, and yet almost FREE. And Uptime Robot does have beautifully designed Public Status Pages.
With these Public Status Pages, you can share the live Uptime stats of your monitoring with your internal team or with your broader audience, such as your website visitors.
We at Rovity use Public Status Pages powered by Uptime Robot. By doing this, any of our customers can see our infrastructure’s actual health in real-time.
Unlike many other web hosting providers who run their internal and mostly static Service Status page, we want to use Uptime Robot’s robust infrastructure.
The problem with the static Service Status page is that the status page will still tell you that their service is Up even if their network is down because they are mostly human editable.
With Public Status Pages powered by Uptime Robot, the signals are real, instant, and monitored by a reputable third-party service provider. So, we can’t make any changes to give you any false proof that our infrastructure is 100% Up all the time.
Here is where we are shining. Our highly available servers and the utmost transparency and loyalty to our customer base is smart.
How is your experience with Uptime Robot or any other monitoring services? Please share that with us via the comments section below.
