Monitor your blogs uptime with Pingdom

When all of your income comes from your internet ventures, website uptime becomes a very important issue. If your sites are down you are losing money so it’s important that your websites don’t suffer from downtime too much. I learned this the hard way and suffered a lot of downtime with my previous host. Thankfully, the hosting company who has been running my server the last 2 years are very reliable so it’s not something which has concerned me as much.

However, I am still very aware of the fact that when my websites down I lose out. My websites may lose money or my blog readers might be annoyed because they couldn’t view the website. Which is why I jumped at the chance of trying out the uptime monitoring service Pingdom. I have been using the service for the last few days and I have to say, it’s pretty good.

Monitor your blogs uptime with Pingdom

The first thing you need to do is add your blogs URL. You can decide how often your website is checked and you can set the type of check as well.

You then need to decide how you are notified of downtime. You can be notified via email and/or SMS, although you only get a set amount of SMS messages in your account every month.

After only a few hours of adding BloggingTips to my account I got this email :

Pingdom DOWN alert: Kevin (www.bloggingtips.com) is down since 17/10/2008 02:23:29.

Shortly afterwards I got the email

Pingdom UP alert: Kevin (www.bloggingtips.com) is UP again at 17/10/2008 02:28:29, after 5m of downtime.

As you can see, the emails don’t really say much other than to tell you your website is down, but you don’t really need anything else.

The dashboard area is pretty straight forward. From here you can see detailed error log reports and graphs showing the uptime of your website.

One of the best features is the monthly report At a glance you can see how often your website was down during that month. According to the report Pingdom checks the following locations for uptime :

• Dallas, TX, USA
• Dallas 2, TX, USA
• Singapore
• Sydney, Australia
• Mumbai, India
• Gloucester, England
• Sacramento, CA, USA
• Amsterdam, Holland
• San Francisco, CA, USA
• Vasteras, Sweden
• Berkeley, CA, USA
• Vasteras 2, Sweden
• Dallas 3, TX, USA
• Houston, TX, USA
• Reading, England
• Stockholm, Sweden
• Stockholm 2, Sweden
• Stockholm 3, Sweden
• Houston 2, TX, USA
• Montreal, Canada

Here are some more screenshots from the monthly report area :

In addition to the monthly reports there are detailed logs available for each error. All of this should help you get a more realistic picture of your downtime and may point you in the right direction towards fixing it.

Cost

There are two types of accounts :

• Pingdom Basic – For $9.95 per month you can monitor 5 URL’s. 20 SMS messages are also included in the package.
• Pingdom Basic – For $39.95 per month you can monitor 30 URL’s. 200 SMS messages are also included in the package.

Thankfully, Pingdom offer a 30 day free trial of the basic package so you can try the service out before you commit to a package. All you need to do is enter your name and email address and an email will be sent to you with your login details.

Overview

If you make money through the internet downtime can cost you a lot of money so having uptime checked every minute is a big help. $9.95 a month might sound like a lot to some people but you need to put it into perspective. For example, I spend around $240 a month at the moment on hosting so another 10 bucks isn’t much in the grand scale of things.

If your hosting costs are less than $50 a month then perhaps it’s hard to justify an additional cost such as this. Or perhaps you need to look at how much you make per month and how important it is to you to know when your websites are down. Personally, I think that most people who make a living on the web can afford 10 dollars a month to get a message sent to their phone telling them when their sites are down.

But you don’t need to take my word for it. As I mentioned before, Pingdom lets new users try the service out for free for 30 days so I encourage you to check it out. If you do, please leave a comment and let everyone know your thoughts on the service.

Link : Pingdom

Written by Kevin Muldoon from Blog Themes Club
Posted on October 21st, 2008 and filed under Domain Names & Hosting
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