One of the things you can do for top Google results is to monitor your website uptime and make sure that your website is always online. Google is interested in one thing, a good customer experience. Part of that, is to make sure that your website is always available to visitors and not off-line.
Most hosting companies boast of a 99.7% uptime guarantee but it’s misleading. That doesn’t mean that your website will be working 99.7% of the time. It only means that if it’s not, the hosting company will refund your money. It’s a pretty safe bet, because most people don’t ask for refunds and even if they do, the refund is minimal.
You may think that a much more expensive VPS account will provide better uptime performance, but my experience showed far poorer performance when I moved my WordPress Multisite website from a shared hosting account at Site5.com to a VPS account at the same hosting company. In fact, the Site5.com VPS crashed almost daily and was slow. I then moved my WordPress Multisite website to WiredTree.com which claims 100% uptime. So far, it’s been 100%, zero problems and it’s fast!
There are many website monitoring services which will check your website uptime automatically and send you a report when your website is down. However, I found one website uptime monitoring service which is really free for up to 50 websites! UptimeRobot.com checks your website’s availability every 5 minutes.
The best part is that Uptime Robot seems to be more accurate. I just tried a test between UptimeRobot.com and one of the more well-known monitoring services, Pingdom.com. Pingdom.com was reporting that my website was down when it was not and UptimeRobot.com was reporting that my website was up.
I was wondering if constant and continuing checking for website uptime reliability every few seconds or minutes would result in showing an inflated number of website visitors or increase use of server resources. However, my hosting company said that website monitoring services simply ping your website and do not increase the number of visitors or use more server resources.
The only thing missing from UptimeRobot.com is a banner to display your up time history on your website. However, I will suggest that to them and I definitely recommend UptimeRobot.com.
UptimeRobot.com provides alert notifications by the following methods for free for up to 50 websites:
- SMS messages
- RSS
- iOS Push notifications (for iPhone, iPad and iPod)
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