swansonager – what is matt up to?

How can I make sure my site is up and running? Website Monitoring.
Ironically enough, I was going to cover this topic today but when I logged into to start my post, I came across this screen (thanks mosso btw):

For those of you that don’t what this means, my site was down. My site, at the time – swansonager.com was experiencing a technical issue connecting to the MySQL Database that powers the back end of the site. Wordpress runs the middle tier of my site if you will and provides an excellent UI to manage all the data, media, etc. that I share, etc.

So back to the issue at hand (and where you might be today with your site):

- You’ve started your site using a lean strategy
- You’ve been creating great content in your niche for your users
- Traffic has started to come in
- Folks are commenting on your blog posts or starting to use your community

So what’s next you ask?

How do I monitor that things are working?

Unlike when you buy a new car and know it works when you start it up and use it everyday, your website is being used by others even when you aren’t using it. After buying your domain, setting up your site, and now creating content for your users, you need to make sure that others can ‘use your car‘ if you will even when you aren’t around to make sure it starts for them.

“Now how can I do that?” you ask – but first a quick aside: do what you know best.

When working on any projects, you should be focusing on what you know best and leaving what you don’t do well to others. What I mean by that is if you are an expert in Copywriting Tips, you would focus on writing the best marketing tips out there. You wouldn’t get side tracked into writing an email system that would alert your readers of your new content. Feedburner can do this for you for free and with no effort.

Any other area piece of software or functionality that is complimentary to your business and would enhance your efforts is very important but there is probably another service provider you can use to get the job done 5 times as fast with 1/2 the cost.

Ok, back to the topic at hand – Web Site Monitoring.

If you are using a service like Google’s Blogspot or the software Wordpress offers for a Wordpress Hosted Blog, you probably don’t have to worry about site monitoring as much. It’s still very important, but there isn’t real action you can take since you are tied to the reliability of the service as a whole and your site’s uptime is not directly tied to your hosting account. So let’s look at some services that offer site monitoring for those of you that are hosting your website with a company directly. If you don’t have a web host yet, John Lee offers some web hosting recommendations on his blog.

Website Monitoring Services

These are only a sampling of some of the web site monitoring companies available. I’ve had experience with both Keynote and Webmetrics. Keynote was a bit on the high end but if you’re running a technology traffic monster site like Michael is over at TechCrunch, you might need a Keynote type of setup. But for the smaller sites out there, someone like Webmetrics or Pingdom (which Twitter uses for site uptime) would suit you just fine.

The bottom line with all this is you need to be taking note of the performance of your site. Just like if you were running a brick and mortar store, you’d expect the power to be up and running 24×7, you expect the same from your webhost. These services above will allow you to be proactively monitoring to see what your uptime looks like and if you need to make changes to any ad providers on your site or even possibly switch to a new web host.

At the end of the day, you want to be sure all your hard work and labor is paying off by having a site that is up 99.999% of the time. You want your website to be served snappy when someone finds you from Google after you’ve posted your ‘Top 10 Reasons to soak up the sun in Iceland with Thor‘ blogpost.