I have an shared hosting account with Dreamhost on which this website and many others sit. Before Christmas I had noticed that, quite regularly, I would check this site to find it down. I would then check my other sites and they were down too. When I contacted Dreamhost, they would apologise for the downtime and my sites would be back again.However, it did worry me that if my sites were down this often when I was manually checking them, how often were they down when I wasn’t checking them? Although this site isn’t an e-commerce site, I believe all sites should be treated as though they are, i.e. – if my site is down for 1 hour, what does that result in lost revenue?So, I began to research automated trackers and quickly discovered Pingdom – a little tracking bug which will allow you to monitor your site’s uptime. It’s quick, easy and free (for a single site). They also have an iPhone app so you can check your website anytime, anywhere. This is an example of the summary you can get from the web interface;
I monitored my site for a month and was amazed to find that my server had crashed over 500 times in one month amounting to over 8 hours of downtime. This was clearly not acceptable but armed with these stats I was able to shout very loudly (but politely) at Dreamhost, and to their credit, they did offer straight away to move me to another server which I was able to do with minimal disruption. They also offered me a partial rebate for my hosting bill in line with their 100% Uptime Guarantee.Since moving servers, my average server uptime has now been consistently above 99.65%,?? however, I can now be safe in the knowledge that I’ll know very quickly if my server starts to under perform again and take immediate steps to rectify it.If you’re a site owner, I recommend you implement similar safeguards as a matter of priority.
Thoughts From My Head 