I just read a good blog post about free website monitoring options on devcurry.com.
I use two of those free services as part of our website strategy at the web design firm I work for in Sydney. mon.itor.us is great for tracking uptime and response times over the previous two months, and www.montastic.com have a really good email notification service. I recommend both of them.
Anyone who has a website needs to decide if they care about downtime, and if so, how much. Unless you don’t care at all, you need a way to measure it. And you probably ought to care because there are lots of implications of unscheduled website downtime, from the appearance of poor customer service to the SEO (search engine optimisation) implications of a flaky or slow website. It might not matter if your pictures-of-cute-kittys website disappears for a few hours or days (but I’ll bet the icanhascheezburger.com people know exactly when their site is down), but if your website is a reflection of your business you need to ensure it’s reflecting the image you try very hard to portray in the rest of your professional life. You wouldn’t leave you shop/office/showroom/studio closed up and not answer the phone at times your clients expect you to be available, right?
Ask your web people if they’re monitoring your site for downtime. If they’re not, ask them if they can. Or use one of these services to do it yourself.
Call us at Mighty Media for advice, or for a free “Website Health Check”, or let us help you with full a website strategy consultation.
Remember, if you aren’t measuring it, you can’t improve it. How is your website performing now? How can you make it perform better?