Downtime is the enemy of any profit-based Web site. Simply put, if your store isn’t open, your customers can’t shop. There are a few ways to attack this problem. If you are a large company with a few on-staff sysadmins, your downtime should be nil.Downtime is the enemy of any profit-based Web site. Simply put, if your store isn’t open, your customers can’t shop. There are a few ways to attack this problem. If you are a large company with a few on-staff sysadmins, your downtime should be nil. But chances are your site is in the other ninety percent: smaller, owner-operated sites. In this case, downtime can be frequent for a number of reasons. This article is aimed at helping these smaller entrepreneurial companies empower themselves to fight downtime.
Downtime can be attributed to many causes from many directions. The first key to eliminating downtime is understanding why your site goes down. If you are hosted in a shared hosting environment (many domains on one machine – if you are hosting your site for under $50 a month then this is you), any number of imaginable scenarios could appear. Hardware failure, sudden spikes in traffic for your site or other sites on the network, loss of bandwidth to the data center, faulty code on your part, third party integration failure, power failure… the possibilities are endless. Some of these problems you can do something about, some you can’t. In order to fight downtime you first need to know when your site is down.
Maybe you’ve grown your site past a shared hosting environment, getting your own server, or maybe even a couple of servers. You have a nice service contract with your ISP that includes a guarantee for 99.999% uptime, and even promises a credit back on your hosting charges if they don’t meet their mark. But all that does is guarantee connectivity from your servers to the Internet. Imagine for a second you are out of town on vacation, not checking your site that much, and everything has been running really smoothly. Suddenly your site is featured in a major online publication, sending masses of traffic your way. You are blissfully unaware on vacation as your machine chokes on all the requests, slowly runs out of ram and starts turning away http requests, finally locking up completely. Assuming you are more diligent than most, you have someone back home checking on your site, or you found an Internet cafe somewhere and discovered what happened – how much profit was lost? So I repeat: the key to fighting inevitable downtime is knowing when your site is not functioning properly.
In any case of downtime, the faster you know about your site being down, the faster you can do something about it, limiting your downtime to the smallest possible amount. It doesn’t make sense to build an alert system into your own servers as if there’s a problem then they are… unavailable. Third party systems are perfect for keeping a remote eye on your Web site, as they are completely separate from your connection and can watch your site from a customer’s point of view. Your site goes down, and they send you an instant alert notifying you of the problem.
There are several types of Web site monitoring solutions – it all depends on how deeply you want your site monitored. You can simply test for connectivity, making sure your server responds to an http request. If you are afraid of being hacked, you can keyword test to make sure your proper content is still being displayed. Have an online store? You can pass a few variables to your shopping cart to make sure it is functioning properly. If you have a managed members area, you can give your test account info to your Web site monitor and have it login to your protected area to make sure you are authenticating your users properly.
There are many Web site monitoring services out there – just Google “website monitoring” for a nice list of them. Prices range across the board, from $4 to $400 per month. fmsNetCheck is one example of a Web site monitoring company. They charge $4 per month per URL and can perform all the checks listed above. They can also monitor email servers, ftp dropboxes… virtually any Web service you have. Sign up for a free trial and see just how simple it is to increase your Web site’s uptime.
Christopher Hedgecock heads up business development at Five Mountain Solutions, an Internet consulting company. His background includes extensive work with MS DRM, MP3.com, and MSN. He can be reached at chris@fivemtn.com.
