If you know the answer, then you already use a monitoring service for your website and you can skip this post. Otherwise, this article is for you.
The only thing worse than a slow website (except a parking ticket) is an unavailable website, or in other words down.

site uptime

Now seriously, when your site is down, you don’t only loose readers and customers at that specific time, you also harm your site’s reputation as a professional one.
This is why it’s so important to monitor your site 24/7 in order to make sure it is always up and responding fast.

If your website is hosted in shared hosting, it’s even more important to monitor it, because your site is stored in the same server machine with many other websites, and it also shares CPU, RAM and IP address with them.
This means that your site performance can be very easily effected by the traffic in those sites, unless your hosting provider does a decent job in preventing these effects.

A traffic peak that occurs in one or more of your neighbor websites, can cause your website to slow down or even become unavailable. If your shared host does not take certain precautions to avoid negative effects of traffic peaks, they will generate bottlenecks, and all websites that share the same server will suffer from it.

Sounds pretty bad, huh? Don’t worry, you can test your host performance to see how well they deal with the pressure, and if you are not satisfied with the results, you can always choose to go with another host or upgrade to VPS hosting.

Monitoring your website

Before signing up with a website monitoring service, you can do some testing yourself in real time:

  1. If you suspect your site is down, check whether it is unavailable to you only, or to everyone else as well. To test it, use this tool.
  2. To test your website response time from different locations around the world, you can use host-tracker.

These tools are suitable for point testing your site responsiveness at a specific time. Next, I highly recommend to sign up (for free) to an online service that will test your site’s up time and response time 24/7.

I decided to go with Pingdom (no, it’s not a sponsored article) simply because they have been around for many years and they seem to be reliable.
My free account there allows me to monitor a single website and send up to 20 SMS alerts to my mobile phone. In addition, I receive email alerts if the site goes down.
There are 3 check resolutions to select from. every 1 minute, 5 min or 15 min. I went with 15 minutes because it seems frequent enough for me at this time.

As you can see in the graph below, my site was down for 1 hour in the passing week, which is less than 1% and therefore considered to be normal.

The response time graph below, however, seemed problematic (I’ll explain why in a minute), so I used a view called “detailed log” and exported it to an excel file to view more details on each response time – the location of the testing server and at what time exactly it took place.

In my article series on how to choose the right web host, I explained that the proximity of the visitor to the host server, effects website loading time and user experience. Unfortunately, I noticed that even though my host server is located in the US, Pingdom’s US based servers recorded a slow response time of 1 second or more.

These results made me think it might be a good time to leave shared hosting and move my blog to VPS or even dedicated server.

Are you in shared hosting? Are you satisfied with it? Do you monitor your site? Which tools do you use?

Additional resources

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