Pingdom can show your website uptime in a graph.
This time last week, I had a bit of a problem. My web hosting company suffered a hardware failure, and my web copywriting website went offline. So did my email, which meant my number one communications channel was severed.
It wasn't a total disaster. My web hosting company was on the case and had everything back up-and-running again within a few hours. They also managed to queue up all the email that came in during that time, so I didn't miss any messages altogether.
Because I was out and about when the problems first occurred, it took me a little while to realise anything was amiss. I use a service which sends me an email should my website fail. But because the problem took out my email too, I never received the message. Whoops.
Since then, I've been looking into tools that will regularly check a website's availability and report any problems. So, for this Friday's tip of the week, here are three that are particularly useful. You can set each up in about five minutes, so if your website is currently unmonitored, it's an excellent way to spend your Friday afternoon:
The fastest way to receive a warning of downtime is usually by text message. Most monitoring services charge for this, but you can escape fee-free by setting your monitoring service up to send a direct message to your Twitter account.
As long as your Twitter account has text notifications turned on for direct messages, Twitter will send you a text every time you receive a direct message. So you'll quickly know if there's a problem.
Has a website outage ever gone unnoticed for you? How did you cope?
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