It certainly is irritating when your web server is down, because you simply lose visitors and potential customer. But did you realize you might be losing more than visitors and potential customers when your web site can't be accessed? According to Vanessa Fox of Google, “If the host is down when Googlebot tries to access your pages, then those pages may disappear from the index until Googlebot can crawl them again.” But how do you know your server is down without constantly checking your sites? This chapter will share a few free services to help you evaluate your downtimes. From there you can decide if it’s time to look for another server solution.
Unless you have no life and want to monitor your web site by hand, hitting the refresh button every five or ten minutes, you will probably be interested in a tool to monitor the process for you. Fortunately some great tools exist to do just that, and the best of them are free. These free services can monitor your downtimes 24 hours a day and 7 days a week and they will let you know if there is a problem either by email, RSS or even on your cell phone through SMS.
Here are some of the best free services to monitor your server downtimes, in no particular order:
http://www.siteuptime.com/
http://host-tracker.com/
http://www.mralert.com/
http://www.montastic.com/
Once you know there has been a downtime issue, you can check in Google’s free webmaster tools to see if the Googlebot had tried to index your site while it was down. Google webmaster tools are at http://www.google.com/webmasters/ and provide a variety of other useful services as well. Simply click on the Webmaster Tools link and register your site if you haven’t already. Once registered, you can check the “crawl errors” link to see if there have been any problems. You can also check the frequency of visits by the Googlebot to see how long the windows are between crawls; if you site is not being crawled frequently, obviously you won’t have to worry about occasional short downtimes.
You don’t have to worry too much if the Googlebot does happen to miss your site on a particular crawl because the site was down. Vanessa Fox also stated that Googlebot will give your site a few tries before actually dropping it from the Google search result pages. But even though it isn’t a true hit and miss issue, you will still be wise to monitor your server downtimes and make adjustments when necessary.
It is obvious that if your website is down, people will rarely give you another chance. If your website gets down too often, it will be in your best interest to move your website to another host before you start active promotion.
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