Getting an email or a phone call from a customer saying “something is wrong with your website” could quite possibly crush any dream at future business from that customer or other potential clients surfing the web for information about your business. Let’s be realistic, there are going to be times that your site may be down for whatever reason and in most of those cases, you may not be able to get it back up before anyone notices. But at the very least, you could be the first to know that your site is down so you can get into “damage control” a little quicker.
With the online monitoring service Pingdom, you will be notified as soon as your site is down, in addition to normal uptime and performance monitoring when things are going just fine. Pingdom is not just for website monitoring either. You can monitor mail servers, DNS servers, FTP servers, networks, and much more.
The Pingdom service monitors websites and servers from multiple locations on the Internet, making sure that they are working. If your site stops working, Pingdom will alert you immediately. Based on your settings, you can have Pingdom inform you and via email or SMS as soon as we detect a problem with your sites or servers. Since Pingdom tests your site as often as every minute you can be quickly informed of any problems. Pingdom also provides reports and updates that track the performance of your sites and servers through the lifetime of your Pingdom account. They allow you to see various trends in downtime, response time and load time.
You can choose to:
– Receive email or txt messages of alerts, updates or notifications
– Login to your Pingdom account online
– Download the Desktop Notifier on your XP, Vista or Windows 7 PC (sorry Mac folks)
OR
*drumroll please*
– Download the free Pingdom iPhone app (iOS 3.0 and up) that lets you connect to Pingdom and view the current status of the websites and services you are monitoring. Additional app features include receiving push alerts to your iPhone, getting information about each check, and customizing the list of shown checks.
A Pingdom account, the iPhone app, and the Desktop Notifier for PC are all FREE, provided to choose either the Basic Plan that includes 5 checks (websites, FTP sites, servers, etc) for $10 bucks a month; or, the Business Plan that includes 30 checks for $40 bucks a month. If you are an individual or a small business and just want to check ONE site/service, there is in fact a free plan that also includes 20 text messages.
If you are a business with an online presence, website downtime can be a thorn in your side, if not the nail in your coffin. The ability to troubleshoot and resolve issues quickly to get your site back up and running is only valuable if you actually know that your site is down. Sure, you could constantly watch your site, like you have nothing else productive to do, or you could get with Pingdom and rest knowing you will be the first to know that your website is down, and quite possibly avoid those embarrassing “did you know your website was down” messages that can be a ding on your reputation.